LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap, Copyright No. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE PLACE OF DEATH 
IN EVOLUTION 



THE PLACE OF DEATH 
IN EVOLUTION 



BY 



NEWMAN SMYTH 



The face of Death is toward the Sun of Life, 
His shadow darkens earth." 

Tennyson 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1897 



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COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



NortorjDtr $mss 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.. 



&o a Briobetr ^Ijggtctan 

WHOSE MEMORY 
MAKES RICHER AND MORE REAL 

LIFE'S PROMISE TO FRIENDSHIP 

OF THE FUTURE 

iEagter ifttatung 



PREFACE 

This volume is the first fruit of a fur- 
ther and larger purpose which the author 
has long had in mind, and which in some 
future season may possibly become ripe 
for its harvesting. It springs from a pro- 
found conviction that the one theological 
task which waits to be accomplished is 
a thorough and comprehensive demonstra- 
tion of the fact, which the disciple of old 
perceived, that the Life was manifested in 
the Christ; and hence it will prove true 
that His essential words meet and match 
the great principles of life which have 
been hidden in nature's heart from the 
beginning. It will be shown how natur- 
ally, and as the appointed heir of all 
things, Christianity wins and wears the 
crown of life. 

The next reconstruction of Christian 
theology will be a vital one; it will re- 
sult from a deeper knowledge and a truer 



Vlll PREFACE 

interpretation of the sacred Scripture of 
Life, which the hand of God has written 
in nature. The coming theologian, there- 
fore, — the next successful defender of the 
faith once given to the saints, — will be a 
trained and accomplished biologist. Not 
only will his thought, descending from 
the heights of solitary abstraction, and 
forsaking the cloistered shades of the 
schoolmen, ancient and modern, proceed 
like the wayfaring Son of man along the 
familiar paths of human life, in closest 
touch with the common heart of human- 
ity; but also each organic form will tell 
to him the story of its origins, and the 
least living cell will unveil the secret 
chambers of its divinity. Partial and 
hurried efforts, indeed, have been made 
in recent years to set our primal faiths 
in their large vital connections; — Mr. 
Drummond's Natural Laiv in the Spiritual 
World, and Mr. Kidd's Social Evolution, 
are stimulating efforts in this direction; 
but the value of these first endeavors lies 
in their true apprehension of the work 
needing to be done, rather than in their 



PREFACE IX 

permanent contribution to its solution. 
The science of biology itself has been far 
too crude, and its theories are still too 
tentative, and even conflicting at many 
points, to warrant us as yet in building 
upon them over-confidently the higher 
conclusions of the Christian reason. 
Nevertheless, within the past thirty 
years, and since Darwin, some sure 
ground has been gained by evolutionary 
science, and biology in particular is open- 
ing fields of knowledge which invite 
fresh inquiry on the part of thoughtful 
believers. 

The larger work, in this attractive 
field, to which the author looks forward, 
may never be brought by him to its 
accomplishment: it is so large and many- 
sided that it can be achieved only by the 
toil of many minds, and as the result of 
prolonged studies and discoveries of the 
laws and processes of life, from the mar- 
vel of the microscopic germ up to nature's 
highest miracle of the potency of human 
thought and love. Both that earlier won- 
der of the living cell, and the later marvel 



X PREFACE 

of the living soul, belong to the same con- 
tinuous order, and are a revealing of the 
same divine mystery of life. All our 
science of nature and the history of man 
may come back at last to the Master's 
single word of interpretation: "It is the 
spirit that quickeneth." 

One reason for the present publication 
of this portion of the author's work is the 
hope that it ma}^ stimulate other minds to 
enter, in the pursuit of similar inquiries, 
that field of evolutionary research which 
not long ago it was thought to be perilous 
for theologians to traverse, and past which 
devout believers were inclined to hasten, 
as though it were a forbidden region, 
haunted with destructive doubts; but 
which we now generally perceive to be 
a field of the Lord, fresh with fruits of 
wholesome knowledge, and bright with 
promise for Christian faith. 

The author ventures also to hope that 
the line of thought which is pursued 
through the following pages may lead 
some readers to surer courage for daily life 
amid its trials and sorrows. It may bring 



PREFACE XI 

help especially to those who must receive 
inward renewal and cheer, if at all, not 
merely from the breath of spiritual fra- 
grance which may be borne in occasionally 
through the soul's open windows — they 
hardly know from whence and how; but 
rather from their thoughtful entertain- 
ment of those serious truths which knock 
for entrance into our minds, as they come 
in plain and honest simplicity from the 
workshops of our sciences, and from the 
fields of laborious investigations. Only 
thus, through an open-minded and fear- 
less hospitality towards all observed and 
reasoned truths, can our Christian faith 
escape the weakness of a pleasing but 
ineffectual desire, and continue to be our 
reasonable service. 

Although the author's main purpose is 
still in the process of growth, suggestive 
circumstances and the warmth of friend- 
ships whose light is in part the joy of 
present life, and in part the influence of 
the unseen, have caused this single branch 
of his thought to come more quickly to its 
ripening; and because as a study it is 



Xll 



PREFACE 



complete in itself, it is now given to the 
public. 

If the sustenance and comfort for our 
dearest and deathless hopes here offered, 
should seem at first taste to any readers 
to be enclosed in a too scientific rind, the 
author trusts that within the harder sci- 
entific reasonings much sweetness and 
strength may be found for our vital 
faiths. In order to render the matter of 
it more easy of access for the general 
reader, necessary technical scientific ma- 
terial and extended citations of authori- 
ties have been relegated to notes in an 
appendix. These notes, however, should 
not be overlooked in any critical review 
of the subject. 

The pursuit for several years of such 
studies increases the conviction in which 
this volume has been written, that new 
light is breaking from evolutionary sci- 
ence, and that in that light we shall see 
coming out again more clearly and more 
surely the simple and immortal faiths of 
our human hearts and homes. 

New Haven, April, 1897. 



CONTENTS 

THAPTEK PAGE 

I. THE ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH IN 

NATURE 1 

II. THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH THE EVIL 

IN NATURE 44 

III. SCIENTIFIC PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 57 

IV. THE FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH . . 107 

V. THE BIOLOGICAL AND THE BIBLICAL VIEW 

OF DEATH 136 

VI. THE METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

IN THE LAW OF DEATH 163 

APPENDIX 207 



THE PLACE OF DEATH IN 
EVOLUTION 

CHAPTER I 

THE ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH IN 
NATURE 

IN recent years biological investigations 
have penetrated within the veil of mi- 
croscopic cells, and learned secrets of life 
and death which were little dreamed of in 
our philosophy. Traces of an infinitesi- 
mal structure, which before had not been 
suspected, have been lately discovered 
within the least and simplest living 
cells; and arrangements of invisible 
molecules of matter in an orderly and 
organized service are now known to be 
provided in the contents of each cell in 
which life has its abode. One of the 
last wonders of modern science consists 

B l 



Z ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

in the disclosure of the intricate mechan- 
ism of the nucleus of each cell, and in 
the revelation of regular processes of its 
marvellous development. Further expla- 
nation of the problem of heredity and 
the causes of variation, which Darwin- 
ism opened, but did not solve, is now 
eagerly sought by many keen-eyed bio- 
logical students, equipped with the high- 
est powers of the microscope, who peer 
into the structural texture, and observe 
the behavior of the vital units within the 
mystery of the egg. The living cell, that 
"long-expected child of time," "the pre- 
cious nursling of the ages," as it has been 
called, has recently drawn to itself an im- 
mense amount of scientific attention; and 
doubtless upon the fascinating mystery of 
its origins, its aptitudes, and its growth, 
it will concentrate still more the interest 
of thoughtful observers who would inter- 
pret with definite knowledge nature's un- 
ceasing drama of life and death. 

Neither of these familiar powers of life 
or death has disclosed to our most in- 
quisitive biological science its last, inner- 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 6 

most secret. The science which has en- 
tered so far within the cell, and which is 
observing with exact definition the last 
hiding-places of life, nevertheless does not 
hear the first creative word, and cannot 
tell the final cause of the origin of life. 
Probably it never will; for to see life re- 
vealed in its first truth might be to see 
the living God. Our science, which thus 
pursues life until it is lost from view in 
some mystery of godliness, has not suc- 
ceeded any better in disclosing the ulti- 
mate nature or final cause of death. Yet 
the nearer approach of recent biological 
science to the origins of life brings knowl- 
edge closer also to the beginnings of 
death in the organic world. Some new 
light is thus thrown by recent science 
over the dark problem of mortality. By 
the scientific method, — that is, by rea- 
soning which proceeds from a basis of 
observed facts, — we may now make a fur- 
ther and profitable study of the origin and 
function of death in nature, and thus be 
enabled to interpret more intelligibly its 
mission for life. 



4 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

Until quite recently our evolutionary 
science was content either to pass by the 
place and work of death without exact 
observation of its uses in nature ; or else 
it has regarded the universal prevalence 
of death throughout the organic world as 
a necessary consequence of the struggle 
of life, and has dismissed it from further 
questioning as an incidental factor in 
evolution. Thus Mr. Spencer was satis- 
fled with a philosophical determination 
and definition of the nature of vital pro- 
cesses, which included the possibility of 
death within the terms of the definition. 
More attention was called to this neglected 
factor in organic evolution by the publi- 
cation in 1881, and again in 1883, by a 
German investigator, Weismann, of some 
results of his studies concerning heredity, 
in the course of which he discussed the 
nature of death, and the causes for the 
limitation in different species of the du- 
ration of life. About the same time an- 
other German zoologist, Biitschli, who had 
carried on extensive researches among the 
lowest organisms, began to entertain ideas 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 5 

somewhat similar to those which Weis- 
mann first published in his essays on 
Life and Death and the Duration of Life. 
Mr. Wallace, who shares with Darwin the 
honor of originating the modern concep- 
tion of the part which has been played by 
natural selection in evolution, in a note 
to his volume on Darwinism (published 
in 1889) remarks that an idea similar to 
that advanced by Weismann, concerning 
the utility of natural death, had occurred 
to him some twenty years before, and 
been noted down, but subsequently for- 
gotten. 

Later investigations seem to require the 
modification in some particulars of the 
ideas originally advanced by Weismann, 
and to put back the first appearance 
of natural death nearer to the earliest 
manifestations of life than he had sup- 
posed. Much work of painstaking re- 
search in this direction remains to be 
accomplished ; and biological theories con- 
cerning the nature of heredity and the 
fundamental laws and processes of life and 
death are still too largely in the air, and 



b ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

they will need to be anchored more se- 
curely to observed facts before we can 
trust entirely our faiths to them. Never- 
theless, much knowledge has been gained 
concerning the origin and functions of 
death in the course of the development 
of life by the researches already under- 
taken; and the facts disclosed, as well 
as the theories advanced by some trained 
biologists, fairly open the new and inter- 
esting question whether death itself does 
not fall naturally under some principle 
of selection and law of utility for life. 
Enough ground, at least, has been won 
by our tentative science to give our phi- 
losophy further, and somewhat more ad- 
vanced foothold in the path of inquiry, 
along which the reason of man makes 
ceaseless effort to surmount the hard in- 
evitableness of death, and in clearer light 
to gain firmer hope of immortality. 

These studies of life which our newer 
biologists, since Darwin, are carrying on, 
may be described in the graphic words of 
one of the oldest observers of nature and 
human life, who was also a tried and 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 7 

troubled theologian, " Man setteth an end 
to darkness, and searcheth out to the fur- 
thest bound the stones of thick darkness 
and of the shadow of death."* Like one 
who sets miners' lamps along the course 
which he would explore, so man in these 
more recent sciences searches to the fur- 
thest bound, and finds there the stones 
which mark for the present the end of 
his inquiry into the thick darkness and 
the shadow of death. Our science of life 
is reaching into the darkness, and farther 
and farther from the borders of the near, 
the tangible, and the visible, it is remov- 
ing the bounds of knowledge out into the 
mystery of life and death. 

Familiarity with the successes, and also 
with the failures, of evolutionary science 
since Darwin will serve to produce, in 
regard to all such inquiries, a reverent 
spirit, if not also an expectant attitude 
of faith. Men who have but slight ac- 
quaintance with the work needing to be 
done, which still lies before our biolo- 
gists, may conjure lightly with the word 
* Job xxviii. 3. 



8 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

evolution, as though it explained all mys- 
teries, and dispensed with any necessity 
of faith; but men who have learned how 
knowledge as well as faith requires pa- 
tience for its perfecting will understand 
the wisdom both of the caution and the 
hope which finds expression in this re- 
mark of one of our American biologists: 
"My last word is, that we are entering 
the threshold of the Evolution problem, 
instead of standing within the portals. 
The hardest tasks lie before us, not be- 
hind us, and their solution will carry us 
well into the twentieth century."* 

While our biological science has thus, 
until quite lately, not ventured so far as 
it might into the darkness of the shadow 
of death over nature, our theology, on the 
other hand, has been and is still contented 
to regard the law of death as a law of sin, 
originally connected with man's fall, and 
as presenting chiefly a human problem to 

* Osborn, The Hereditary Mechanism and the 
Search for the Unknoivn Factors of Evolution, in 
Biological Lectures, Wood's Holl, for 1894, p. 100. 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 9 

our faith. The fact of the prevalence of 
death in nature before man's fall has been 
left vaguely in the background of theology. 
It has sometimes been ignored as a prob- 
lem of evil with regard to which we have 
no clear word of revelation ; or, when the 
problem of natural evil has pressed like a 
burden upon the heart of faith, the en- 
trance of death into the creation before 
man has been hesitatingly explained as a 
necessary anticipation of the curse which 
was predestined to fall, and which nature 
consequently must, from the beginning, 
make ready to let drop in due time upon 
the sin of man. Death, occurring in the 
natural order of life, has thus been re- 
garded as a part of the preparation of the 
stage for the tragedy of man's sin and 
the victory of his redemption. 

Our theology may be excused for not 
gaining any larger and more intelligent 
conception of the appearance of death in 
nature beneath man, so long as our bio- 
logical science has had little or nothing 
to say as to the exact point in the evolu- 
tion of life where death first entered, and 



10 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

while also it has been unable to offer any- 
thing better than a general conjecture con- 
cerning the natural function and possible 
service of death in the evolution of life. 
But our Christian theology would be wor- 
thy of blame, should it not be quick to 
take up into its conception of the divine 
order of benevolence any hints which re- 
cent biology may have to suggest with 
reference to the probable natural utilities 
of death. It is of religious concern, as 
well as of scientific interest, for us to 
learn, and to think out, as far as we 
possibly may, all the facts and sugges- 
tions which prolonged and microscopic 
researches may bring to our knowledge 
concerning the minute processes, or most 
intimate and hidden laws of life and 
death. For if we, children of an age of 
questioning and of change, are to keep a 
rational faith in spiritual reality, strong 
and genuine as was our fathers' faith ac- 
cording to their light, ours must be a faith 
that shall strike its roots down deep into 
all knowledge, although light from above 
alone may bring it to its perfect Christian 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 11 

trust and sweetness. If, then, our bio- 
logical science is running the lines of 
its investigation deeper across familiar 
ground, as well as over fields of knowl- 
edge not hitherto upturned, our faiths 
should quickly follow, sowing again their 
seed of promise in the freshly worked 
soil. Nor should we despise any hints 
which biology may bring of larger utili- 
ties in nature than we have imagined, 
because such facts may seem at first 
thought to be slight and insignificant. 
The least facts of nature may be germi- 
nal with high spiritual significance and 
beauty. 

Analogies indeed from natural laws 
are not proofs of spiritual processes ; and 
they should never be pressed beyond 
the probabilities of reason which may lie 
within them. The demonstration of the 
spiritual order cannot lie in the natural. 
Nevertheless, if the universe be framed 
in one divine thought, and its laws, in 
different realms of it, proceed from the 
same Intelligence, we should expect to 
find that knowledge, shining suddenly in 



12 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

any part of it, will throw revealing light 
also over other outlying regions, and es- 
pecially over those dark spiritual places 
which may lie contiguous to the points 
which some science is lighting up; for 
the different spheres and orders of the 
cosmos, from the lowest to the highest, 
are not so many separate and closed 
spaces, but the universe is connected in 
all its parts, — its rooms are all open- 
windowed, and its successive chambers 
lead into one another; — there are many 
mansions and one house of the Father. 

What is thus true in general of the 
value of any single science for the 
broader illumination of life, does not 
hold false of the service which biology is 
beginning to render to our conception of 
the law of death. If we may discover 
and carefully observe the working of a 
power favorable to life's best ends in 
the utilities of death in nature, we shall 
have thereby a light in our hands by 
means of which our reason may possibly 
find its way still farther through the mys- 
tery of death in our human life. It is 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 13 

true that under the existing limitations 
of our earthly experience we may not ex- 
pect to reach a full explanation of any of 
the great laws of nature, and a final dis- 
covery of the one benevolence in them 
all; but partial explanations are better 
than none, — the child's imaginations may 
seize upon enough of the truth to satisfy 
the mind of the child, until it shall put 
away childish things, and know as it is 
known. We should not neglect therefore 
as insignificant the least divine hints 
which may have been dropped amid the 
silences of nature; for any such sugges- 
tions may prove a very present help to 
reason while faith waits for the final 
revelation. 

We shall seek, therefore, to gather up 
such knowledge as recent biological sci- 
ence may have to offer concerning the 
place and function of death in the order 
of nature; and then we shall proceed to 
inquire whether such knowledge has any 
further interpretative value in relation to 
the law of our human subjection to death, 
and its attendant suffering. 



14 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

What has been from the first the r61e 
appointed for death to play in the unfold- 
ing drama of life in nature? Looking 
down through the history of ever-ad- 
vancing life on the earth, looking back to 
the first appearance and working of death, 
do we discover any signs which indicate 
that death, contrary to our common judg- 
ment of it, has had appointed to it all the 
while a benevolent part, that it has not 
been the natural enemy, but in reality a 
servant of life, — a helpmeet for ever 
more abounding, higher, and happier life 
on the earth? 

The first fact which has been observed 
is, that natural death does not appear im- 
mediately at the beginning of the history 
of life on the earth. There was no such 
thing as death, or at least nothing like a 
dead body, when life first stirred, and for 
some indefinite period after life began to 
increase and multiply in earthly matter. 

The earliest and the simplest organism 
consists of a single cell. That unicellular 
organism is now known to be not com- 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 15 

pletely homogeneous, or without begin- 
nings of distinctions between its parts; 
but within the divine simplicity of a 
single cell, the infinitesimal tracing of 
whose marvellous structure may be de- 
tected by our microscopes, while its per- 
fect discrimination defies their powers, 
life begins its work, never henceforth to 
cease, of organizing matter for increasing 
sentience, for developing function and 
faculty, and for final aptitude and ser- 
vice for self-conscious thought and love. 
Our human interest in the problem of 
the origin and the destiny of life may be 
concentrated in the study of this earliest 
and simplest living organism, composed 
of a single cell. What Tennyson sang 
of the "Flower in the crannied wall" 
would be now more true of the efflorescence 
of life in the little cell which the biologist 
plucks " out of the crannies " : — 

" I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 

If we could read the whole secret of that 



16 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

living cell, we might know the mystery 
of our origin and our destiny. Before it 
or within it, is there any trace to be 
discovered of a pre-existing life, or any 
hint to be found of life's coming glory? 
Does life in its earliest known beginnings 
contain any revelation of a Spirit that was 
before it, or disclose any mystery of Mes- 
sianic promise of its coming divinity? 

These questions, however, concerning 
the ultimate origin and possible spiritual 
direction of life, we hold in reserve for a 
later place in our present plan of discus- 
sion; we are content to begin with a 
strictly biological conception of life as a 
peculiar property of matter, or, as it has 
been tersely stated, "as matter in a pecu- 
liar state or condition." Whatever may 
have been the origin of life, we may read 
with scientific eye its story, after it has 
come to write upon the records of the 
earth its history and its prophecy. We 
may notice the point where, so far as 
known, death first enters the course of 
life. 

That which actually occurs, after life 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 17 

has come far enough out of the unseen 
for us to see and to touch it, and to 
keep its growth under the eye of our 
science, may be summarily described as 
follows: The first one-celled organism 
does not exist for a season, produce an- 
other like itself, and then decay, and die, 
and totally disappear; it does nothing of 
the sort; the one thing it does is, not to 
die, but to live on. It succeeds in living 
on, and on, by a very simple yet persis- 
tent process ; for after a while it divides 
itself into two cells, each like itself, and 
thus it continues to exist, living in these 
cells a double life; and this process of 
simple division and multiplication is car- 
ried on for a number of successive genera- 
tions without the appearance of any dead 
ancestor, or of anything like that which 
we mean when we speak of a dead body. 
The simplest forms of life, if left to them- 
selves, if left under favorable conditions, 
and without accident, to follow their 
natural course, do not die; they bud and 
divide, they increase and multiply. 

This process of cell-division and multi- 



18 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

plication, it was supposed by Weismann, 
might naturally continue in an endless 
succession among the unicellular organ- 
isms; hence he held that such organisms 
are potentially immortal. As the entire 
substance of each cell passes into the cells 
into which it divides, the process leaves 
behind it no trace of anything resembling 
a dead and decaying animal form, and 
hence it has been said of these lowest 
organisms that "no Amoeba has ever lost 
an ancestor by death." 

In the multicellular organisms, — those 
composed of several cells, or groups of 
cells, — life grows more complex. The 
germinal cells — those which bear the 
hereditary matter and the continuous 
reproductive power of life — are distin- 
guished, according to Weismann's theory, 
from the somatic cells, — those forming 
the body, which support, while they are 
themselves fashioned by, the germ-cells. 
These latter cells, Weismann supposed, 
in their differentiation from the former, 
lost the power of indefinite multiplication ; 
and probably for the benefit of the other 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 19 

germinal cells, which contain the undying 
germ-plasm, or continuous, hereditary mat- 
ter of life, the somatic (body) cells became 
limited in the number of their possible 
divisions ; that is, they acquired mortality, 
and acquired it as an advantageous adap- 
tation to the ends of life. Hence death 
first appeared among the multicellular or- 
ganisms (Metazoa), and it appeared on 
account of its utility. 1 

This supposition, however, of the poten- 
tial immortality of the lowest organisms 
through an endless process of cell-division 
must be modified by the results of later 
experiments which were conducted with 
much painstaking by the French biologist, 
Maupas. 2 His investigations consisted of 
the careful culture and observation of suc- 
cessive generations of several species of 
the unicellular animals (the Ciliated In- 
fusoria). He was able to follow in differ- 
ent cultures the history of from two to 
over six hundred successive generations of 
these minute organisms. Two methods 
of reproduction had previously been ob- 
served among these organisms, the one 



20 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

by fission, — an asexual method ; and the 
other by something resembling fertiliza- 
tion, through the meeting and partial 
blending of the contents of two cells, — a 
conjugation of cells, — after which each of 
them continued to multiply by dividing 
into daughter cells. These researches of 
Maupas showed that among these higher 
Protozoa the preservation of the species is 
maintained by occasional intervention of 
this higher method of conjugation, and 
that without it the power of cell-division 
and multiplication becomes enfeebled and 
in time is completely lost. " The evident 
result," remarks Maupas, "after long and 
fatiguing experiments, is that the life of 
the species with the Cities is divided into 
evolutionary cycles, having each for its 
point of departure an individual regen- 
erated, and its youth renewed by a sexual 
completion."* 

By isolating individual Infusoria, and 

thus preventing them from renewing their 

power of reproduction by meeting other 

more distantly related forms of their own 

* Comptes Bendus, 1887, pp. 356-359. 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 21 

species, Maupas discovered among the 
descendants of the isolated individual 
increasing signs of enfeebled life, senes- 
cence, and loss of the power to multiply; 
and finally the succession of their genera- 
tions came to a complete pause, and a dead 
cell was left at the end of it.* At this 
point natural death, so far as now known, 
first appears. In the light of these inves- 
tigations, life is seen to continue through 
a rudimental form of sexual rejuvenescence 
reaching on towards further and still more 
highly organized forms ; while life in its 
primitive method of multiplication by 
simple cell-division begins to droop, and 
at last to die. A double line of life is 
thus observed: the one, that composed 
of the sexually reinforced cells, branching 
up, and bringing forth more fruit; the 
other, that composed of the isolated, un- 
reinforced cells, continuing for a while, 
but at length, as though overshadowed by 
the more fruitful branch, and as no longer 

* " In nature, however, this limit is probably 
seldom if ever reached." — Sedgwick and Wilson, 
General Biology, p. 170. 



22 ENTBANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

advantageous for nature's end of a more 
abundant life, left to wither, and because 
no longer useful to come at length to an 
end. This end of this less advantageous 
method of the propagation of life is death ; 
thus nature produces and abandons the 
first known body of death in the history 
of life. 

These researches of Maupas show that 
death may have entered into the course of 
life, earlier than Weismann had at first 
supposed, among the simpler unicellular 
organisms. If their universal validity 
should be admitted, they would compel us 
to modify the supposition of the immor- 
tality of the Protozoa by limiting it, among 
the Infusoria, to such organisms as are 
kept in the cycle of an ever self-rejuvenat- 
ing life. Death would overtake those (if 
there are in nature any such) who fall out 
of this improved cyclic method of self- 
reproducing life. Some doubt, however, 
seems to be thrown over the universal 
validity of these experiments; and even 
if we admit that they indicate a general 
law of the continuation of life among the 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 23 

higher classes of the Infusoria, they do not 
necessarily prove, as Maupas himself was 
careful to observe, that a similar cyclic 
rejuvenescence obtains among still lower 
and simpler organisms. Simpler forms 
may (upon Weismann's theory of the con- 
tinuous germ-plasm they must) possess 
indefinite power of cell-division without 
any interruption by death.* But these 
investigations, however they may modify 
the original supposition of the immortality 
of all the Protozoa, serve to determine more 
exactly the point in nature where death 
enters ; and they also throw new light over 
the earliest working and use of death 
among the simplest organisms. 3 

An important fact of far-reaching sig- 
nificance, which these microscopic re- 
searches reveal, is the connection between 
the first observed occurrence of death and 
the earliest observed occurrence of sex, or 
something resembling sexuality in nature. 

* "It is not known whether or not the Amoeba 
ever dies of old age." — Sedgwick and Wilson, General 
Biology, p. 166. 



24 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

Their intimate connection in the time of 
their appearance does not show that the 
one is the cause of the other ; but it does 
show that both are introduced together in 
the process of life as co-operative factors 
for the furtherance of life's mission on the 
earth. Death enters, so far as now known, 
in connection with the alternation between 
two methods of reproduction and multipli- 
cation of life ; it occurs naturally in the 
course of the change from the asexual 
method of simple cell-division to the 
method of fertilization, which in time 
comes to be nature's dominant method not 
only of preserving life, but also of giv- 
ing it variety, richness, and plastic power 
of adaptation to different environments. 4 
With the rudiments of sex appear also the 
beginnings of death. With the entrance 
of the new method for the enrichment and 
diversification of selected life through sex, 
enters also the law of decay and death for 
that remainder of life which is not caught 
up into this higher potency of nature's 
fertilization. In this first discrimination 
of nature between the reinforced cells, 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 25 

destined to live, and the unrejuvenated 
cells, destined to die, there is seen to be a 
resemblance to the last judgment of life, 
as the Scripture describes it: "Then shall 
two be in the field ; the one shall be taken, 
and the other left." So death in the ear- 
liest judgment of life signifies that which 
is left, and left as the least available organ 
for life. 

Death by its timely coming completes 
nature's first work of keeping in the field 
the form capable of the better life and its 
further development. 

Death is thus discovered to be a second- 
ary, and not a primary, event in the course 
of life. It did not come in at once as the 
necessary termination of the first individu- 
alized form or organ of life ; for, as Mau- 
pas' investigations show, these simplest 
organisms may survive without a dead 
ancestor among them for at least a large 
number of generations. The reign of 
death cannot be said to have been univer- 
sal from the beginning; for whole cycles 
of infusorian life escape it. Its reign 



26 ENTRANCE AND USE OE DEATH 

began with the coming of a new, more 
powerful dynasty of life. From the begin- 
ning life was more than death. The law 
of life has been the dominant law ; the law 
of death was at first partial and secondary. 
Moreover, the known facts seem to justify 
the assertion of some biologists that death 
may be regarded as itself a product of life. 
"It is more probable," remarks Mr. Cope, 
" that death is a consequence of life, rather 
than that the living is a product of the 
non-living." * 

This view of the secondary and subordi- 
nate function of death, which is thus indi- 
cated by our knowledge of its earliest 
working, is not to be set aside by any 
explanation which may be offered of the 
ultimate cause, or causes, which render 
the entrance of death possible in nature. 5 
It is an unproved assumption that there is 
any inherent necessity of death in the 
nature of organization, or in some inevit- 
able limitations of the recuperative and 
reproductive powers of life. A possibil- 
ity, it is true, for the original appearance 

* Primary Factors of Organic Evolution, p. 483. 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 27 

of natural death may be inherent in the 
instability, or in some other unknown con- 
ditions, of the molecular matter of life; 
but the possibility of death is not a neces- 
sity for it, as the continuance of the germ 
of life from one form to another shows, or 
as the self-rejuvenescent conjugations of 
the Infusoria, according to Maupas' inves- 
tigations, demonstrate. 

Nature's possibilities are not always her 
necessities. A physical possibility of 
death may be converted into a natural 
necessity for it under the operation of 
other laws, like that of natural selection, 
and as an adaptation to other ends of 
nature. With regard to the ultimate 
cause of death, biology finds itself before 
very much the same question which con- 
fronts it in the study of the cause of varia- 
tion. We have as yet too little exact 
knowledge to enable our science to settle 
confidently upon any one theory of the 
original cause of variation; but uncer- 
tainty with regard to the factors which 
produce variations does not prevent us 
from recognizing the function and service 



28 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

of variability as a primal principle of life. 
So uncertainty with regard to any primal 
possibilities of death, which nature may 
have left open, need not prevent us from 
recognizing its utility as a means of 
further life when it does find entrance 
into the course of nature. 6 

From these observed facts, therefore, 
concerning the origin and earliest work- 
ing of natural death, we may proceed to 
further reasonings concerning its future 
mission in the process of the higher or- 
ganization of life. It is seen to be an 
ever-recurring step of nature in the ascent 
of life. 

As life becomes more organized and 
complex, death prevails. It comes to 
reign on earth, because it comes to serve. 
At length in the history of life a living 
form arose, so multicellular and so well 
organized, that it ceased to continue the 
course of life simply by dividing and mul- 
tiplying itself into daughter cells ; it had 
acquired the power of giving up its life 
for another ; it died in order that its off- 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 29 

spring might continue its life in forms 
struggling to still higher organization, 
and better fitted to survive while it must 
perish. 7 One parent form passes away in 
order that others may catch up the motion 
of life, and in turn transmit to others 
life's rhythm and joy. Thus death comes 
in to help, and not merely to hurt; to 
help life further on and higher up, not to 
put a stop to life. It evidently became 
advantageous to life as a whole that cer- 
tain primitive forms should be left by the 
way to perish. The column of the living 
marches on, though individual organisms 
fall by the wayside; life, ever regnant, 
continues through death, and past death, 
on to more life and richer. In other words, 
in the first struggle of animate exis- 
tence, by bringing into the field regiments 
of better equipped forms, life scores a vic- 
tory, although to win it, it must leave its 
dead upon the field. 

This fact of the utility of death for life 
will become still further intelligible, if we 
attempt to conceive what might have been 
the result if death had not kept the stream 



30 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

of life from clogging up and becoming 
stagnant. For if death had not entered, 
then the more finely organized, the more 
masterful, and the fairer forms of life 
would not have appeared. There would 
have been no stimulus and response of life 
for their production. There would have 
been no call for their appearance under the 
law of natural selection ; they would not 
have been needed for the maintenance of 
life. Death breaks up the crust of nature 
so that the germinant life may spring up, 
and grow into the light. Death ends the 
monotony of the same kind of continued 
life, and gives it occasion for a new spring, 
and existence upon a higher level. The 
course of life would have been arrested, 
had not death come with helpful hand to 
clear away products of life no longer use- 
ful, to remove outworn and mutilated 
forms, and to let the deepening stream 
flow on. If we suppose other laws and 
processes of nature to remain such as we 
know them to be, we may assert that there 
could have been made on this earth no 
garden, no flowers, no birds, no leafy trees 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 31 

for them to sing in, had it not been for the 
entrance and the ministry of death; had 
death never been sent along life's way to 
take from life its useless burdens, and to 
set its energies free for better adaptations 
and results ever more fair and fruitful. 
Man himself might not have been made of 
the dust of the earth, if that dust had not 
been mingled of the elements of the dead 
forms which were before him. We owe 
our human birth to death in nature. The 
earth before us has died that we might 
live. We are the living children of a 
world that has died for us. 

Biology furnishes thus to philosophy a 
suggestion of profound truth, and of far- 
reaching significance. For if we once 
recognize the adaptation and use of any 
factor in the organic world, we are already 
within sight of some rational apprehension 
of its benevolent function. This concep- 
tion of the natural utility of death in its 
original working throws a new light into 
one of the dark places of natural theology. 
In the mechanism of nature it means that 
death itself is one of the methods or con- 



32 ENTRANCE AND USE OP DEATH 

trivances which nature has devised and 
steadily uses in order to carry her work- 
manship on, and to make finer products. 
It means that death in the course of nature 
is not to be regarded as a disaster, — the 
breaking of a wheel or parting of a belt in 
nature's workshop, — but rather as the in- 
troduction of a new device for turning out 
improved manufactures. As an original 
adaptation of means to ends, death is to be 
regarded as a mark of beneficence rather 
than as a natural sign of evil. It has been 
brought about, as other adaptations have 
arisen, in order that nature may do better 
work; just as the ear or the eye are 
adaptations which have been fashioned 
and achieved in nature, in order that the 
range and the joyousness of animal life 
might be enhanced. So death as an adap- 
tation in the divine economy of nature is 
introduced as a means of life, of ever-in- 
creasing and happier life. 

There is another sign of the natural 
utility of death to be found farther down 
in the course of life, which we proceed 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 33 

next to point out. The duration of life 
for the individual members of different 
species seems to have been determined 
upon the principle of utility, for the 
preservation of the species. The length 
of the average lifetime among the higher 
organisms may, to a considerable extent, 
be measured upon a scale of advantages to 
the species. We have just been observing 
the fact that near the unicellular beginnings 
of life death slips in for the benefit of life 
on its way up to higher organization ; we 
adduce now the further consideration that, 
after a considerable degree of animal or- 
ganization has been reached, death contin- 
ues to work for the maintenance of the 
best issues of life ; and it works thus benefi- 
cently for the species by regular inter- 
ventions at periods of time which are, on 
the whole, most adapted to the purpose 
of preserving the several species. The 
length of the life of the golden eagle, for 
instance, seems to sustain some arithmeti- 
cal proportion to the time in which the 
individual eagle should be permitted by 
nature to live, if the species of eagle is to 



34 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

be preserved. The single bird is naturally 
permitted to live as long as it is expedient 
in order to secure enough eagle's eggs, 
and to save enough young eagles, to keep 
some eagles always in existence circling 
in the air or perched on loftiest crag. 

Upon this principle of the advantage or 
disadvantage to the species of a longer or 
shorter lifetime for the individual organ- 
isms, the duration of life seems in some 
instances to have been lengthened, while 
in other instances it has been shortened ; 
sometimes, also, in the same species the 
lifetime of one sex has been prolonged, 
while the brief day of existence for the 
other sex has been hastened to its end. 
The females of one kind of moths rarely 
live for more than three or four days ; but 
"the males which fly swiftly in the forests, 
seeking for the less abundant females, live 
for a much longer period, certainly from 
eight to fourteen days." On the other 
hand, the queen bee lives two or three 
years, and often longer; but the drones 
live only four or five months, — as long 
as it is of any use to the colonies of bees 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 35 

for the drones to exist. " Their value to 
the colony ceases with the nuptial flight, 
and from the point of view of utility it is 
easy to understand why their lives should 
be so short." There are instances, like- 
wise, in which the lifetime of both sexes 
seems to have been shortened ; and the ex- 
planation is the same, that on the whole 
the shortened lifetime was more advan- 
tageous to the existence of the species, and 
that a longer time would have been use- 
less. Here, also, in determining the dura- 
tion of the time granted to her many 
children for existence on this earth, nature 
makes no haste or waste, but gives to each 
that which is best. The may-flies furnish 
an instance of the reduction of the lifetime 
to a brief hour of existence, which is long 
enough, however, to insure a constant suc- 
cession of swarms of ephemeral insects 
over the pools of water. Thus it may be 
regarded as a general principle of life, 
which further researches will not discard, 
but illustrate and confirm, that death 
comes to different species when it is best 
for the species that it should intervene ; 



36 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

when, that is, all natural advantages and 
disadvantages taken together, it is most 
expedient that the individual should give 
up its separate existence. Natural selec- 
tion, which is nature's method of promot- 
ing the best interests of life, has seized 
upon death as a means of doing further 
good work for the benefit of life. 

Other considerations, such as the size of 
an organism, its complexity of structure, 
its physiological condition, and other 
relations to the sum-total of animated 
existence, may have had influence in de- 
termining the lifetime of different species ; 
but the total result of all these deter- 
minants of the period of life, and the neces- 
sity at stated times of the intervention 
of death, may be expressed in terms of 
utility. The equation of the life-periods 
of species may be written as an equation 
of known and unknown utilities. 

From these curious studies and these 
intimate researches into the nature and 
the causes of death among the more highly 
organized forms of life, one definite fact 
seems further to become clear with refer- 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 37 

ence to the natural utility of death. It 
is seen to prevail in connection with an 
increasing division of labor among the 
parts of an organism. In the least differ- 
entiated cell, no such division of labor 
could exist. Such a cell would be a whole 
being to its environment at every point of 
contact with it. It would owe its success 
to precisely the same principle as that to 
which an English statesman once said his 
success in life was due, — that of "being 
a whole man to one thing at a time." 
Because it is so unspecialized, the one- 
celled organism (although not without 
some structure) can readily divide without 
loss of life ; the lowest organisms also may 
reproduce parts which are mutilated or 
lost. To some extent, but with decreas- 
ing power, the higher organisms still pos- 
sess this facility to repair or to replace 
injured parts. But this power of self- 
reproduction decreases and finally comes 
to an end, as organization grows more 
complex and many-sided. The higher 
animals stand in manifold relations to 
their environment. The body of an ani- 



38 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

mal is a mechanism in which the principle 
of division of labor has been carried to a 
high degree of complexity and perfection. 
Now it is worthy of further note that the 
function which nature has given death to 
fulfil, seems to be connected with this in- 
crease of the division of labor between 
different parts of the higher organisms. 
The prevalence of death accompanies this 
increased specialization of function; and 
the function of death may further be said 
to be one of the natural means for the ac- 
complishment of this increasing differen- 
tiation of organs and division of labor, 
which in turn are necessary to the full 
development and perfection of life. This 
consideration leads us, however, directly 
towards another, and still more interesting 
suggestion, which recent biology may offer 
to our moral philosophy concerning the 
nature and use of death. 

Some signs may be discovered of a sacri- 
ficial service of death in the natural course 
of life. Some living cells seem to have 
been born in order that they might give 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 39 

up their life to other cells. In fulfilling 
their appointed functions, they themselves 
suffer dissolution. They complete their 
work by dying. Hence our naturalists 
sometimes speak of the principle of sacri- 
fice as one of the great principles of as- 
cending life in the economy of nature. 
We find a trace or suggestion of this sacri- 
ficial method in the lowliest beginnings, 
and amid the simplest functions, of organ- 
ized life. Instances of animal devotion 
are familiar; and we are accustomed to 
find an instinctive anticipation, at least, 
of the moral law of sacrifice in the habit 
which impels many wild animals to pro- 
tect the lives of their offspring at the cost 
of their own. But our biology carries 
this natural principle of sacrificial function 
deeper down, and farther back, into the 
elements and fundamental processes of 
life. Our physiology has its substitu- 
tionary theories of the replacement of cells 
in the discharge of many vital functions. 
Indeed, the specific function of certain 
cells, as in the secretory glands, for in- 
stance, seems to be to dissolve, and to be 



40 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

cast off, for the benefit of the organism. 
How these cells acquired this natural vir- 
tue of self-effacement; under what process 
and discipline of kindly nature living 
cells, whose inner energy prompts and 
stimulates them to continuous self-preser- 
vation, achieved this habit of becoming re- 
jected and despised, perishing themselves, 
while the whole body survives and grows, 
— this is hardly as yet a matter of scien- 
tific conjecture ; but the sacrificial property 
which such self-effacing cells have ac- 
quired as their specific character is a 
matter of observation. 

We should be careful not to transfer 
moral quality from our self-consciousness 
to processes of nature in the sentient life 
beneath us; it should be regarded as an 
abuse, rather than a profitable use of 
natural analogies, to employ the words 
which express the culmination of our 
supreme life of love, when we would 
describe animal instincts or physiological 
movements, which may nevertheless bear 
suggestive and sometimes even striking 
resemblances to the higher laws of our 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 41 

spiritual nature. To assume an identity 
between these lower and these higher 
functions of life would not be to carry 
up natural law into the spiritual world, 
but rather to bring the spiritual into bond- 
age again to the physical. The begin- 
nings of altruism in the social instincts 
and habits of many animals are not in 
themselves a moral process, as the begin- 
nings of sensibility in the movements of 
protoplasm are not an intellectual process ; 
but the lower may form a physical basis 
for the higher, and the beginning may 
prefigure the eventual issue of life; for 
both the lowest and the highest, both the 
laws of motion and sensibility in the 
humble origins, and the laws of conscious- 
ness and freedom in the diviner issues of 
life, proceed from the same source, bear 
marks of the same ideal, and are evidence 
of the same immanent Intelligence, in 
which all things are rationally wrought 
and directed. 

We adduce, therefore, at this point 
this further fact of a principle of life 
to be discerned among the constituent 



42 ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 

cells of some tissues, which may be de- 
scribed as substitutional and sacrificial, 
not because of any moral import which 
may be imputed to it from our self-con- 
scious life, but because it offers further 
and direct evidence of the natural utility 
of death. Individual cells cease to exist, 
and have, in some way not as yet suffi- 
ciently investigated, acquired the habit of 
ceasing to exist, in order that the welfare 
of the organism as one whole may be 
maintained. Primitive sacrificial death 
in nature thus falls under the law of the 
survival of life. 

We may now sum up in one general 
statement the facts, and the direct sug- 
gestions of the facts, which our recent 
biological study brings within reach of 
our reasonings. We find that death has 
many uses in the economy of nature ; that 
it is indeed so useful that life itself has 
to call forth death to help it forward on 
its endless way. We discover that natural 
death is only in appearance an enemy; 
that in reality it is a servant and helpmeet 



ENTRANCE AND USE OF DEATH 43 

of life. We might go so far as to assert 
the seeming paradox that, if it had not 
been for the early entrance of death, life 
itself might not have risen to its full 
potency, and in its best and fairer forms 
it could not have continued to exist. In 
consequence of death, life develops, and 
the ministry of death is throughout a 
service for life, — for the increasing ful- 
filment of life's promise, and for the at- 
tainment of the greatest possible variety, 
richness, beauty, and universal joyousness 
of life. The one regnant, radiant fact of 
nature is life, — and death enters and 
follows as a servant for life's sake. 



CHAPTER II 

THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH THE EVIL 
IN NATURE 

WE pause for a moment at this point 
in our inquiry to look abroad over 
the facts and evidences of nature now open 
before us, and to observe whether we have 
thus far gained any position of advantage 
from which to survey more intelligently 
the whole problem of natural evil. We 
have not at this point attained by any 
means the last height of nature's great 
argument for life and immortality; but we 
have reached a higher ground from which 
we may comprehend in a larger horizon 
the province of evil in nature. 

Moral philosophy has generally hitherto 
been content to enter a plea of abatement 
in behalf of the benevolent design of nat- 
ure against the impeachment of it by the 
prevalence of evil in the world. Ethics 

44 



THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 45 

has borrowed from natural science mate- 
rials for its argument in extenuation of 
the sufferings which are involved in the 
struggle of life, and in the seemingly cruel 
necessities of death. But there has been 
lacking some one single, clear principle 
of justification for the entrance of death 
into nature, and the further possibilities 
of suffering connected with death. Pleas 
of extenuating circumstances may relieve, 
but only the discovery of some all-perva- 
sive principle of action, in itself clearly 
benevolent, can justify the temporary ex- 
istence of suffering ; the final moral expla- 
nation of natural evil will be furnished 
by the revelation of some law of divine 
procedure in the evolution of life and its 
fruits, which in itself shall be seen to be 
rational, and which will be recognized in 
its whole working and issue as a law of 
love. Our theologies have always in their 
several ways been seeking after such a 
theodicy — a justification on some clear 
moral principle of the general procedure 
of God in the course of nature. Of late 
years our evolutionary science has brought 



46 THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 

fresh eyes to the old task of discerning the 
good at the heart of things evil; and in 
general, evolution may be said to furnish 
a thoroughly hopeful philosophy of natural 
evil; it finds argument of increasing good 
in the development of nature, and becomes 
optimistic even in its last outlook over 
the dissolution of worlds and the passing 
away of this present order of nature. 

The mitigating circumstances which may 
be adduced in alleviation of the hard facts 
of the existence of suffering and death 
throughout the animal kingdom have been 
happily put by Mr. Wallace in his remarks 
upon the " Ethical Aspect of the Struggle 
for Existence."* He holds that the 
amount of animal suffering is "greatly 
exaggerated; that the supposed 'tor- 
ments ' and c miseries ' of animals have 
little real existence, but are the reflection 
of the imagined sensations of cultivated 
men and women in similar circumstances ; 
and that the amount of actual suffering, 
caused by the struggle for existence among 
animals, is altogether insignificant." In 
* Darwinism, pp. 36-40. 



THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 47 

evidence of this more cheerful view of 
animal suffering, he adduces the facts that 
" animals are entirely spared the pain we 
suffer in the anticipation of death — a pain 
far greater, in most cases, than the reality " ; 
that consequently animal life is a perpetual 
enjoyment without " any serious dread " ; 
that violent deaths, which are the rule 
under nature's general law of prey, "if 
not too prolonged, are painless and easy " ; 
death, likewise, through gradual weakness 
and exhaustion is not necessarily painful. 
In the other scale, outweighing the suffer- 
ing, Mr. Wallace puts the enjoyments 
which nature has provided for the lives of 
most animals, such as their coming into 
existence usually at the time of year when 
"food is most plentiful, and the climate 
most suitable," and the "continual round 
of healthy excitement and exercise, alter- 
nating with complete repose," which is the 
rule of life among animals as they reach 
their maturity. " We must therefore con- 
clude," he remarks, "that animals, as a 
rule, enjoy all the happiness of which they 
are capable. . . . Thus the poet's picture of 



48 THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 

' Nature red in tooth and claw 
With ravine,' 

is a picture the evil of which is read into 
it by our imaginations, the reality being 
made up of full and happy lives, usually 
terminated by the quickest and least pain- 
ful of deaths." 

To this appeal which Mr. Wallace makes 
to the facts of animal happiness on the 
whole, may be added some further con- 
siderations which Mr. Drummond has 
pointed out in his chapter on "The 
Struggle for Life. " * He reminds us that, 
when it is said an animal struggles, "all 
that is really meant is that it lives ; " that 
" with exceptions, the fight is a fair fight. 
As a rule there is no hate in it, but only 
Hunger." He lays stress upon the fact 
that essentially the struggle for life is 
"the attempt to solve the fundamental 
problem of all life — Nutrition." And, 
what is still more important, Mr. Drum- 
mond urges that the principle of the 
struggle for life itself undergoes, and is 
destined to undergo still further changes ; 
* Ascent of Man, pp. 203 sq. 



THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 49 

every animal feature of it, in enlarging 
regions, is "discredited, discouraged, or 
driven away"; and "the amelioration of 
the Struggle for Life is the most certain 
prophecy of science." * 

The further apology for natural evil, 
which may be made from the side of moral 
philosophy, has been argued with much 
particularity, as well as force and beauty, 
by Mr. Martineau in his discussion of 
"Alleged Blemishes in Nature."! He 
argues with Plato that the crowning glory 
of creative Power is its " ungrudgingness" ; 
that the waste of life does not involve any 
moral "breach of promise " on nature's 
part; that an incidental end realized by 
her method is " the investiture of the world 
with a glorious exuberance, furnishing it as 
a majestic palace with endless galleries of 
art and beauty, instead of as a cheap board- 
ing-school, with bare benches and scant 
meals." He lifts the argument with nat- 
ural evil up into the higher terms of the 
"moral structure and discipline of this life." 

* Ascent of Man, pp. 211, 212. 

t A Study of Beligion, Vol. I. , p. 330. 



50 THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 

After all this is said, we still miss, 
however, one clear principle of moral pro- 
cedure, in relation to which all kinds and 
degrees of natural evil may be surveyed, 
estimated, and finally judged. To gain a 
sure and clear apprehension of some unify- 
ing and all- justifying principle of benevo- 
lence in nature and throughout the history 
of life, may be a spiritual achievement far 
too high as yet for the human reason to 
compass, or for the human heart to rest 
in with untroubled trust. The Omnis- 
cient alone can reveal the full and final 
theodicy. There are many questions with 
regard to which even devoutest believers 
must accept Erasmus' saying that we must 
let them wait, not to the next Ecumenical 
Council, but " till the veil is removed and 
we see God face to face." 

Without presuming, however, that we 
may be able to gain through the expansion 
of knowledge a scientific comprehension of 
the whole mystery of evil, any research is 
welcome which indicates that some intel- 
ligent and straightforward method of pro- 
cedure has been followed by nature through 



THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 51 

the mystery of evil. We should not 
lightly esteem even the least facts which 
at any intermediate point may indicate the 
direction towards final good of the long, 
winding, but ever-onward path of life and 
death which nature is following. Do the 
facts, then, which recent biology is open- 
ing to our further inquiry, cast any inter- 
preting light upon the function and use 
for life of natural evil ? 

It may be urged without exaggeration 
of its significance that to establish clearly 
a law of utility in the function of death, 
would bring our reason nearer to the fun- 
damental principle and continuous method 
of divine benevolence with regard to all 
natural evil. If such a law is firmly es- 
tablished in our science, — to return again 
to Job's imagery, — at will mark another 
course of known boundary stones in our 
search towards the end of thick darkness 
and of the shadow of death. For if, as we 
have observed, death entered into life, not 
at the beginning, and for the immediate 
disappointment of its promise, but farther 
on, and later down, and in order to help 



52 THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 

clear the way for richer fulfilment of life's 
promise, then death, in its primary intent 
at least, is justified; in its original and 
working relation to life and the ends of 
life, death, which seems to man to sum up 
all evil, is seen itself to illustrate a prin- 
ciple of natural benevolence; as much 
so, at least, as any other natural adapta- 
tion may be alleged to be evidence of good 
purpose, and not of evil design. If it can 
be scientifically shown that death falls 
under the general method of natural selec- 
tion, by means of which nature has seized 
upon every point of advantage for the 
benefit of life ; then the working of death 
becomes as true to life, and as beneficent, 
as the general law of natural selection, 
under which it works, may be affirmed to 
have been true throughout to life's best 
ends, and to operate as a benevolent prin- 
ciple of perfection. It affords our moral 
philosophy a position of no small advan- 
tage to be assured by our biological science 
that the natural evil which accompanies 
death, is evil let into the world through a 
door which was opened for the further out- 



THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 53 

going and larger outlook of life. Death, 
with its attendant evils, does not spring 
up in the path of life as a sudden foe, to 
turn life back, to frustrate its purpose of 
good, to mangle the form, to wound the 
spirit, or to break the heart of nature ; but 
it enters and follows in the path of life as 
a servant, burying the useless waste, re- 
moving the outworn garment, and provid- 
ing ever-needed nutriment, as life strug- 
gles and marches on to its height and joy. 
It is much if we may perceive with some 
scientific precision that the happiness of 
animated existence is due to the func- 
tion of death as well as to the energy 
of life. 

When in the fresh summer air we see, 
and reflect in our own cheerful mood, the 
delight in existence with which all nature 
teems, we may find a better reason for our 
trust in the divine benevolence than that 
which Paley gave, when he regarded this 
provision for the happiness of animated 
existence as the outcome of a series of 
divine acts of mechanical drawing and 
designing; for with a better theological 



54 THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 

belief in the living One, in whom all live 
and move and have their being, and from 
a science which traces more intelligently 
the continuous lines of his working, we 
may be assured that all this life and joy- 
ousness of the summer's day is the sure 
and increasing issue of his whole proce- 
dure and order of nature; that in nature's 
larger method death serves life, and evil 
is for good; that to the vital powers, which 
include, also, and use the forces of decay 
and dissolution, the joy and melody of 
forest and field are due ; that the beauty 
of the flowers and every song of bird in 
the sunny air is a tribute of nature to the 
timely friendliness of death as well as to 
the constancy of life, through which — 
both of them working together — such 
color and fragrance, such balancing of 
wing and circling flight, and such out- 
burst of melodious sound have in nature's 
fulness of time become possible in the 
garden of the Lord. 

Contemplating, therefore, the facts which 
have thus been brought within the range 



THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 55 

of our observation, and which indicate the 
useful function of death under the prin- 
ciple of natural selection, we may reason 
with the greater theological confidence 
that the existence of natural evil offers 
no necessary or finally inexplicable re- 
proach against the method of the Creator 
in fitting the earth for the abode of ani- 
mated existence, and in leading life on to 
ever-increasing fruitfulness and joyous- 
ness. Unless we could presume that on 
the whole a much better universe might 
have been devised for the attainment of 
the ends of life, — and we have no knowl- 
edge or reason to warrant such measure- 
less presumption, — we can assert that 
whatever is an essential factor of the ex- 
isting order, and is seen to work helpfully 
with it, and not obstructively against it, 
partakes of the general character of the 
whole system, to which it belongs, and is 
good, if the order as one whole is benefi- 
cent. 

In view of the utilities of natural death 
which are coming to be known, we may 
the more confidently conclude that the 



56 THE PATH OF LIFE THROUGH EVIL 

Creator will never need to apologize to 
the creation for having permitted the door 
for the entrance of natural evil to stand 
open for a while into nature. For it has 
been opened for life's sake. 



CHAPTER III 

SCIENTIFIC PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMOR- 
TALITY 

THE facts which we have thus far drawn 
from recent biological science do not 
seem at first glance to yield us any firmer 
footing, if we seek to find our way further 
out into the vast mystery of our possible 
human life after death. They enable us 
to perceive that the way of death is a way 
of advantage for the life of the race as a 
whole ; but we are not yet helped on in 
the argument of our human hearts for per- 
sonal immortality. 

Our biological sciences, while assuring 
us of the general utility of the law of 
death, might seem to be no better com- 
forters to hearts overwhelmed with personal 
sorrow than were Job's three naturalistic 
friends, who reasoned with him as hope- 
fully as they could, but without healing 

57 



58 PRESUMPTIONS OP IMMORTALITY 

balm in their words, from man's knowledge 
then of birds and plants, and the many 
dark processes of nature up to the bands 
of Orion, and the sweet influences of the 
Pleiades. Yet it is something to gain 
once more, with sure footing on observed 
facts of nature, an Old Testament belief 
in the continuance of a royal line of life, 
and the immortality of the chosen race. 
The Old Testament faith in national and 
social immortality is not yet the gospel of 
the Life which was manifested, and 
which is risen in the Christ to personal 
immortality ; but the Old Testament faith 
in the continuance and the perfection of 
the glory of the royal succession of life in 
Israel, was the preparation for the gospel 
which brought life and immortality to 
light. Should the help, then, of recent 
biological science desert us altogether at 
this point, and offer no further suggestion 
in aid of our personal quest after a surer 
confidence in our life beyond death, we 
might still be grateful for this contribution 
of evolutionary science to the fundamental 
Old Testament conception of a selected 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 59 

line of life, from which a Christian faith 
may lift higher its immortal hope. Bnt 
the suggestive aid of modern biology does 
not cease altogether at this point. If with 
the facts already adduced we group other 
results of evolutionary studies, and follow 
them all out as far as we reasonably may, 
we shall discover, planted before us, 
several further stepping-stones across the 
stream towards the end of darkness and of 
the shadow of death. 

Before proceeding, however, to pass in 
review the facts and considerations which 
science may contribute in furtherance of 
the argument for personal immortality, we 
need rightly to conceive of the nature of 
the aid which we may rationally expect 
the bodily senses to bring to faith, and 
which the science of sensible phenomena 
may leave for the argument of divinity. 

This aid of natural science to moral and 
spiritual faith may be of a threefold nature. 
First, it may remove objections to the 
higher possibilities of nature and life, 
which our religious faiths assume. Ad- 
vancing knowledge may overcome the 



60 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

obstacles which appear at first sight against 
spiritual affirmations. Later science may 
lay level difficulties of faith which ear- 
lier science has raised. Increasing vis- 
ion may open larger possibilities than 
are seen as yet. If there is an unseen 
universe, connected with the seen by 
intangible bands, and continuous with 
it through invisible transformations of 
energy; then the science of the seen, as 
it exhausts in its analysis the measurable 
energies of the universe, may render the 
more irresistible the conclusion that there 
must be an immeasurable and living Power 
within and beyond all visible phenomena. 
The closing act of all science will be 
silently to leave the reason face to face 
with the mystery of the unseen. Hence 
final presumptions of natural science may 
become the first assumptions of faith. 
Where the sight of the eye ends, the vision 
of the reason begins. A rapid survey of 
the results to which evolutionary science 
in many directions is coming, would in- 
dicate that such is in part the aid which 
it is destined to render to a new, natural 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 61 

theology. At some of the very points 
where at first it raised seemingly impas- 
sable objections, it has itself in time sur- 
mounted its own difficulties, and given 
larger scope and increased energy to the 
argument of divinity which once it 
seemed to bring to a full pause. The 
fate, for instance, of the argument from 
design in the hands of evolutionists il- 
lustrates this power of growing science to 
overcome its own darker scepticisms. At 
first evolution interposed a sudden stop to 
the reasoning from mechanical analogies 
of design, which theology had confidently 
pursued through whole series of Bridge- 
water Treatises. Paley's evidences were 
dropped from the course of a liberal edu- 
cation. But the same evolutionary science 
is now introducing a truer and larger tele- 
ology of its own. The argument from the 
watch, as Mr. Fiske would say, has been 
superseded by the argument from the 
flower. A better natural theology is to 
be gained by beholding the lilies in their 
growth than by reasoning from the con- 
struction of a timepiece. This is only 



62 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

saying that God's creative thought in 
nature's evolution is not as our thought 
in designing an artificial mechanism. 
The evidences which indicate that some 
way of evolution has been nature's uni- 
form method serve likewise to reveal 
closer thought and deeper wisdom in 
nature. Her ends are immanent in her 
workings. If nature in its separate parts 
appears to be mechanical, as one ordered 
whole it is rational. Evolution, indeed, 
proceeds more like a process of thought 
than like a piece of handiwork. 

A second aid to faith, which may rea- 
sonably be expected from the advance of 
natural science, will consist in an increas- 
ing presumption, of positive force, in 
favor of moral and spiritual interpreta- 
tions of the world. Thus the new tele- 
ology — the enlarged argument for design 
— to which we have just referred, not only 
furnishes an instance of the manner in 
which science may be left to overcome 
its own spiritual difficulties, but also it 
offers an example of the further positive 
presumption which increasing knowledge 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 63 

may render faith. As nature in her most 
intimate processes becomes better known, 
it is to be expected that the reason of man, 
ever at work on its moral task, will find 
more material of knowledge to be reformed 
and refashioned with improved methods 
into more attractive patterns of religious 
belief ; and the history of science justifies 
this expectation. For only to superficial 
observers, or to intellects shut up in their 
own unvital, and hence unyielding, habits 
of thought, has there ever seemed to be a 
warfare between science and religion. No 
reconciliation of the two is needed, when 
both are honest and true. The only real 
question is, — and it is a question always 
fascinating to candid inquirers, — what 
may nature further teach science, and what 
more may faith learn from the science to 
which nature is teaching new truth? 

Besides these two kinds of help, which 
natural science may lend to faith, there is 
still a third possible aid by no means to be 
despised, — the service, namely, of science 
to the spiritual imagination. The diffi- 
culty of faith at many points does not lie 



64 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

in any intrinsic unreasonableness of it, 
but in its inconceivableness. The trouble 
is one of the imagination. The difficulty 
sometimes is not that the reason is not 
willing, but that the imagination is weak. 
Imagination often becomes a worse sceptic 
in us than the reason. Imagination by 
its weakness sometimes betrays faiths 
which no reasoning could take by assault. 
One cause why the faith of little children 
is so quick and undoubting is to be found 
in childhood's power of making its beliefs 
vivid and real in concrete and distinct 
imaginations. Even when rationally con- 
vinced of a truth, we may need to become 
as children again in imagination, in order 
that we may walk in the faith of the spirit. 
Thus the difficulty of conceiving how 
thought and love can continue when no 
longer manifested through a bodily pres- 
ence, and the utter exhaustion of our 
imaginative power in the effort to render 
intelligible the conditions of the life be- 
yond death, may produce an oppression of 
heart and numbness of spiritual response 
to the Christian hope, which is not an un- 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 65 

familiar mood even to devout believers. 
Hence any aid which science may offer to 
the spiritual imagination is an acceptable 
service. If a spiritual law may be ren- 
dered more conceivable in some analogy 
of natural law, or if a scientific concep- 
tion may readily lend itself to some fur- 
ther spiritual use, timely aid will be thus 
given to faith where its strength often 
fails, and where help is most grateful. 

Moreover, though science may fail to 
bring any material form to the positive 
help of faith, it may still render good ser- 
vice by showing that this difficulty of 
imagination is nothing peculiar to the 
spiritual sphere. A similar failure of the 
imagination follows all our inquisitive 
sciences. One of the hardest tasks given 
to the modern mind is to realize in dis- 
tinct and definite concepts the fundamen- 
tal truths of physics or biology. Yet with 
sure and strenuous persistence science 
leads us through worlds of unimaginable 
things. The nature of the ether, the sub- 
tilties of molecular combinations, the com- 
plexity of processes in the growth of an 



bb PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

organism from the inwrought marvel of a 
vital cell, surpass our powers of concep- 
tion; yet for that reason neither physics 
nor biology tarries or stops in its course 
of reasoning from observed facts. No 
scientific conclusion, if required by strict 
reasoning, is lightly to be cast aside 
because we have no imagination for it. 
We may gain, then, from the pursuit of 
scientific inquiries needed aid for our 
spiritual faiths in our hours of imaginative 
weakness and unbelief. 

The limits also of the possible service 
of science to the spiritual faiths of man 
should be observed. We shall injure 
rather than help our faith, if we seek for 
more knowledge through the science of 
the senses than they are organized to re- 
ceive. Arguments from visible analogies 
may be helpful, until overdriven. More- 
over, we may submit more cheerfully to 
the limitations of our spiritual knowl- 
edge, when we see clearly within what 
bounds must necessarily be kept the help 
which can possibly be brought, either for 
the reason or the imagination, from the 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 67 

restricted, but not unfriendly, realm of 
natural science. 

Thus we must not expect any science to 
bring within reach of our senses a demon- 
stration of the vast outlying spiritual 
reality of the universe. There are only 
two conceivable demonstrations of the life 
beyond. The one is such evidence as 
the disciples received, when they saw the 
appearance of their risen Lord, and when 
by his manifestation to them of his same 
thought and love he convinced them that 
it was He, and not another, — the Master, 
and not the gardener, who said, "Mary." 
His spiritual identity was the essential 
part of his self-revelation to the disciples. 
The manner in which he may have mani- 
fested that, is the least important truth of 
the resurrection. The other, the only 
other way now conceivable of the demon- 
stration of the future spiritual life, will be 
our personal experience of it, when we 
shall rediscover ourselves after our escape 
from this mortality. 

With these preliminary remarks, there- 



bO PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

fore, concerning the possible useful ser- 
vice, and the necessary limitations of the 
aid, which any knowledge of visible nature 
may be expected to lend to faith, we now 
resume the discussion of the suggestions 
of recent evolutionary science concerning 
death and immortality. 

We shall seek first to gain the broad 
vantage-ground for the argument for im- 
mortality, to which evolutionary science 
leads, observing the enlargement of our 
whole prospect of life, which it opens 
before us; then, secondly, we shall point 
out the new and promising view, in the 
direction of the life beyond, which may 
be gained from our present inquiry con- 
cerning the natural law of the utility of 
death. 

A broader and more luminous concep- 
tion of the universe as existing in some 
all-pervasive Intelligence, — this, in a 
single sentence, may be said to be the 
rational conception of the creation to 
which we are led by all our scientific 
observation of it. Evolutionary science 
exalts and enlarges the spiritual prospect 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 69 

of man, if we follow it far enough, and 
are intellectually strong enough not to be 
stalled in any materialistic morass across 
which its first course may run. The stur- 
dier thinkers among our recent evolution- 
ists are not hopelessly swallowed up in 
the bog of materialism; Darwin never 
affirmed that in tracing the earthly descent 
of man he had solved the whole problem of 
his being and destiny; Tyndall and Hux- 
ley never owned the materialism of those 
coarser thinkers who, like Vogt, could 
compare the relation of thought and the 
brain to that of the gall and the liver; 
Mr. Wallace gets clear across the Serbo 
nian bog, and reaches firm, high ground 
on which to build man's moral and spiritual 
faiths, when, in the closing chapter of his 
Darwinism, he holds that his interpretation 
of the evidence enables us to " accept the 
spiritual nature of man, as not in any way 
inconsistent with the theory of evolution, 
but as dependent on those fundamental 
laws and causes which furnish the very 
materials for evolution to work with."* 
* Darwinism, p. 476. 



70 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

And Romanes' Life and Letters, together 
with his Thoughts on Religion, show 
how the way may be opened and trav- 
ersed by a persistent reasoner from an 
abandoned mechanical theism, along a path 
of strictly scientific thought, towards a 
high and clear faith in the One omnipres- 
ent Mind, in which alone the universe, as 
one ordered and reasonable whole, can 
find its ultimate explanation. Similar 
signs of return towards belief in some 
intelligent direction and spiritual causa- 
tion of the phenomena of life may be dis- 
cerned in the reasonings of several of our 
biologists. The conception, which an 
apostle of old had gained, does not lie far 
from our modern biology, that there is a 
living One, in whom we live and move 
and have our being. It is distinctly 
recognized as the ultimate biological in- 
ference by some investigators, and it lies 
philosophically close to the conclusions 
of others, who do not discern so distinctly 
the theistic tendency of their own work. 
Thus Professor Cope regards conscious- 
ness not as a product, but as an essential 



PRESUMPTIONS OP IMMORTALITY 71 

condition of life.* We may notice in 
much recent scientific literature a state of 
mental quiescence, if not of acquiescence, 
towards religious faiths. It may be de- 
scribed as a promising pupa condition of 
modern evolutionary thought. Although 
it may not as yet respond actively to spir- 
itual stimuli and suggestion, it lies in a 
transitional condition, which is interest- 
ing and hopeful; for it would seem to 
show that one period of scientific negation 
of the spiritual life has come to its natural 
close, and to indicate the possibility of a 
further unfolding and upspringing of sci- 
entific thought into the light of a higher 
life in spiritual energy and joy. A sign 
of this mental condition and its promise 
may be found in a passage with which 
Weismann closed his essay on the Dura- 
tion of Life, after he had reached the 
scientific conclusion that the organic world 
must once have arisen, and further, that 
it will at some time come to an end. But 
before he can drop the whole matter with 
this conclusion, he adds these words: 
* Primary Factors of Organic Evolution, pp. 508 sq. 



72 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

"Yet who can maintain that he has dis- 
covered the right answer to this important 
question? And even though the discov- 
ery were made, can any one believe that 
by its means the problem of life would be 
solved? If it were established that spon- 
taneous generation did actually occur, a 
new question at once arises as to the con- 
ditions under which the occurrence became 
possible. How can we conceive that dead 
inorganic matter could have come together 
in such a manner as to form living proto- 
plasm, that wonderful and complex sub- 
stance which absorbs foreign material and 
changes it into its own substance, in other 
words, grows and multiplies ? " 

" And so, in discussing this question of 
life and death, we come at last — as in all 
provinces of human research — upon prob- 
lems which appear to us to be, at least for 
the present, insoluble. In fact, it is the 
quest after perfected truth, not its posses- 
sion, that falls to our lot, that gladdens 
us, fills up the measure of our life, nay! 
hallows it." * The hallowing of life, from 
* Essays upon Heredity, p. 35. 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 73 

the consciousness that our science does not 
possess the secret of it, and in the felt 
presence of some larger mystery around 
and above it all, comes very near being 
that fear of the Lord which is the begin- 
ning of wisdom. 

From several directions scientific 
thought approaches, and with increasing 
reverence, the spiritual mystery of the 
creation. The sublimation of matter — 
the supersensuousness of the primal con- 
ceptions of physics — indicates the dis- 
tance which scientific thought is compelled 
to go from the visible phenomena of 
nature, and the closeness of its approach 
to the unseen realities of the created uni- 
verse. Hence it is not surprising that 
the more speculative physicists, having 
passed beyond atomic matter in their con- 
ception of the ether, from which the atoms 
were presumably derived, raise the further 
question, whether the initiative of all that 
we see and may know, is not to be postu- 
lated as " a something existing beyond the 
ether," capable of acting upon it, yet not 
necessarily in any such mechanical rela- 



74 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

tions to the ether as those which we may 
observe in the laws of molecular energies 
on this atomic side, so to speak, of the 
ether. * 

Still more the study of the phenomena 
of life presses biological thought on 
through all molecular changes towards 
the outlying idea of the Spirit. The un- 
veiling of the intricate tracery of structure 
in the living cell; the observation of mi- 
croscopic machinery of segmentation in 
the nucleus of the egg ; the effort to follow 
still further the involved, but definite, 
lines of hereditary development, have 
already shown that the phenomena of evo- 
lution are far too complex to be reduced 
to any single formula, — such as the laws 
announced by Darwin and Spencer of the 
struggle for existence, adaptive selection, 
and survival of the fittest. No one exist- 
ing biological school, with its favorite 
principle of selection, use and effort, 
growth-force (bathmism), or any mechani- 
cal pressures and planes of cleavage, 
commands general assent, or offers an 
* See Biological Lectures, Wood's Holl, 1895, p. 81. 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 75 

explanation adequate to the diversified 
facts of life. Each new issue of our sci- 
entific periodicals will contain some fresh 
suggestion or question (and too often some 
barbarously compounded new word), if 
not some further light upon the organic 
factors of evolution. It is true that the 
once recognized school of vitalists have 
been of late generally excluded from good 
biological society. Their supposition that 
there is a special vital force is discredited, 
as indeed it should not be assumed, in a 
science which limits itself strictly to the 
observation of material phenomena. The 
science of life must be a knowledge in 
which distinctive vital phenomena are 
seen and traced in their relations to other 
known processes and energies of nature; 
life can be scientifically studied only as 
a series of phenomena connected with cer- 
tain molecular constitutions and chemical 
changes. As seen from the physical side, 
there can be in vital phenomena no breach 
of continuity. Nevertheless, the fact that 
life may be known, up to a certain extent, 
as a mechanical process, should not be suf- 



76 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

fered to obscure the further fact that it can 
thus be known only in part, — and that not 
the most intimate and significant part of 
it. The reserved mystery of life, beyond 
any known physical and chemical rela- 
tions, is vastly deeper and larger than the 
single perplexing question which concerns 
its origin on the earth. Spontaneous gen- 
eration — an exception to the uniform law 
of biogenesis — has never been proved; 
but even though its possibility under 
earlier and favorable conditions of matter 
should be admitted, the problem of life 
would not thereby be solved; the question 
as to its nature and the directive law of 
its development would then only be raised. 
The problem of heredity is a remaining, 
and a more inscrutable part of the prob- 
lem of life. 

The attempt to think out any imagi- 
nable theory of heredity (including in 
it the directive determination of vital 
energies and the constancy of vital repe- 
titions, as well as the tendency to varia- 
tion, and the processes of adaptive devel- 
opment) constitutes a mental task which 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 77 

baffles imagination, if it does not put 
the most strenuous reasonings to final 
confusion. When Weismann first began 
his work, he said that we have no theory 
of heredity; and since he has published 
his theory of the germ-plasm, with its 
shifting ingenuities, the statement may be 
made with still greater assurance, — there 
is now no one theory of heredity which 
commands general scientific assent. A 
vast deal has been learned; the facts of 
heredity are more distinctly known; but 
the primal and directive laws escape the 
microscope. Of the hereditary matter, 
which Weismann assumes, he remarks, 
"Its structure must be far more complex 
than we can possibly imagine. " * The diffi- 
culty of the imagination in conceiving its 
complexity, and in tracing the lines of its 
mystic workings, does not grow less, but 
becomes greater, the farther we follow this 
eminent biologist in his endeavor to meet 
with his ever-plastic theory the multi- 
plicity of the vital facts which require ever 
new explanations. The problem of the 
* Germ-Plasm, p. 108. 



78 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

schoolmen concerning the number of 
angels that might be conceived as stand- 
ing on the point of a needle, may be said 
perhaps to equal, it hardly can surpass, 
the question which is thus raised by our 
latest biology as to the number of "bio- 
phors " (bearers of life) which may find a 
quiet resting-place within the confines of 
a single biological unit. We are not 
arguing that the difficulty of rendering a 
scientific theory imaginable is a sufficient 
reason for its rejection, if it is a necessary 
scientific deduction; we are simply stating 
the fact that the most persistent effort to 
comprehend all the phenomena of life, 
which modern science has witnessed, 
drives us to the very borders of the things 
which are seen, and leaves us attempting to 
handle something which we cannot grasp, 
and to touch that which is intangible. 

The marvel of development from the 
microscopic nucleus of a germ-cell may 
be put before the imagination by a sim- 
ple illustration. Suppose we could see a 
small heap of brick, scraps of metal, and 
pieces of mortar, gradually shaping them- 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 79 

selves into the walls and interior structure 
of a building, adding needed material as 
the work advanced, and at last presenting 
in its completion a factory furnished with 
varied and most finely wrought machinery. 
This would be an apt image of the transfor- 
mation which our science declares actually 
occurs in the development of the constitu- 
ent elements of life from the egg into the 
structure, organization, and play of func- 
tions, which we behold in the finished 
animal form. Admitting that vital devel- 
opment follows lines of mechanical con- 
struction; that every higher part rests 
upon the parts beneath it; that each 
wheel of its complicated mechanism works 
in perfect adjustment to every other por- 
tion of the machinery, — nevertheless, the 
building up of the building is the wonder 
of it all philosophically to be accounted 
for. 

We may take as another illustration of 
the marvel of the mechanism of life this 
passage from a recent text-book on Gen- 
eral Biology: "We may perceive how 
extraordinary these properties are by sup- 



80 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

posing a locomotive engine to possess like 
powers : to carry on a process of self -repair 
in order to compensate for wear; to grow 
and increase in size, detaching from itself 
at intervals pieces of brass or iron en- 
dowed with the power of growing up step 
by step into other locomotives capable of 
running themselves, and of reproducing 
new locomotives in their turn. Precisely 
these things are done by every living 
thing, and nothing like them takes place 
in the lifeless world. " * But it is pre- 
cisely these things in the mechanism of 
life which it is difficult to reduce to any- 
physical equivalence, or to determine in a 
quantitative analysis. We may work out 
these vital quantities in our mechanical 
equations, but the terms at the end of the 
calculation, as at the beginning, are un- 
known factors of life. This reserved sig- 
nificance of life, beyond that which may 
be expressed in its mechanical equiva- 
lents, is admitted by many biologists who 
have studied closely the material relations 
and conditions of vital phenomena. No 
* Sedgwick and Wilson, General Biology, p. 4. 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 81 

one in our day has pursued life, as a form 
of material energy, with a more curious 
and persistent inquisition than has Pro- 
fessor Weismann; yet while stoutly 
maintaining the necessity of a purely 
mechanical conception of the processes 
of nature as alone justifiable, he writes: 
"I nevertheless believe that there is no 
occasion for this reason to renounce the 
existence of, or to disown, a directive 
power; only we must not imagine this to 
interfere directly in the mechanism of the 
universe, but to be rather behind the latter 
as the final cause of the mechanism."* 
He adds: "But just as we must assume 
behind the phenomenal world of our senses 
an actual world of the true nature of which 
we receive only an incomplete knowledge, 
... so behind the co-operative forces of 
nature which ' aim at a purpose, ' must we 
admit a Cause, which is no less incon- 
ceivable in its nature, and of which we 
can only say one thing with certainty, 
viz., that it must be teleological." This 
knowledge "leads us to foresee the true 
* Theory of Descent, II., p. 708. 



82 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

significance of the mechanism of the 
universe."* 

An American biologist, who finds it diffi- 
cult to conceive of life apart from matter, 
nevertheless is compelled to include the 
mechanical conception of it in some larger, 
prior element of life : " I think it possible 
to show that the true definition of life is, 
energy directed by sensibility, or by a 
mechanism which has originated under 
the direction of sensibility."! Others, 
like the philosopher Hartmann, are in- 
clined to carry the mystery of life still 
further back, and to suppose that the 
atoms are endowed, besides their other 
known properties, "with an elementary 
sensibility." But even though all matter 
should be thus regarded as having in some 
sense vital properties, its development 
along definite lines, and with an imma- 
nent design, is still the unexplained me- 
chanical problem of life. 

There is a scientific arrogance which 
seems to forget how great is the remaining 

* Theory of Descent, II., p. 712. 
t Cope, Origin of the Fittest, p. 425. 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 83 

mystery of life, when the eager hand of 
an experimenter succeeds in lifting some 
corner of the veil of the fine physical and 
chemical process under which its secret of 
living intelligence is hidden. In contrast 
with such premature exultation may be 
put the following conclusion of one of the 
soberest and most careful investigators 
among our American school of biologists, 
who has recently published a valuable 
contribution to general biology ; — his 
words illustrate the wisdom which Dr. 
Chalmers happily described as the modesty 
of true science. " When all these admis- 
sions are made, and when the conserving 
action of natural selection is in the fullest 
degree recognized, we cannot close our 
eyes to two facts ; first, that we are utterly 
ignorant of the manner in which the idio- 
plasm of the germ-cell can so respond to 
the play of physical forces upon it as to 
call forth an adaptive variation ; and sec- 
ond, that the study of the cell has on the 
whole seemed to widen rather than to nar- 
row the enormous gap that separates even 
the lowest forms of life from the inorganic 



84 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

world."* The presumption of a purely- 
mechanical conception of nature's highest 
manifestation of feeling and thought is 
well hit by the keen philosophic wit of 
this remark of the late Clerk Maxwell: 
" The atoms are a very tough lot, and can 
stand a great deal of knocking about, and it 
is strange to find a number of them combin- 
ing to form a man of feeling." f Increas- 
ing and intimate acquaintance with vital 
phenomena will not serve to diminish the 
force of the following conclusion of this 
same typically scientific mind: "I have 
looked into most philosophical systems, 
and I have seen that none will work 
without a God. "J The theory of some 
super-physical direction in the origin and 
development of life is more easily conceiv- 
able than an exclusively mechanical theory, 
which would leave intelligence entirely 
out of all the determination of the world. 
It is not at least impossible to conceive 
of vital movements, and of all physical 

* Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, 
p. 330. 

t Life, p. 391. t Ibid., p. 426. 



PEESUMPTIONS OF IMMOKTALITY 85 

processes, as existing in, and proceeding 
through, an omnipresent Intelligence; as 
we know that ideas, and whole trains of 
thought, pass in a definite arrangement 
and logical order of succession through the 
human mind. Such a conception is more 
thinkable, because more analogous to our 
own consciousness, than is any merely 
mechanical conception of the play of forces 
in nature. The moment biology lifts up 
its eye from its experiments and begins 
to philosophize, it perceives that life has 
a larger spiritual background. Vital phe- 
nomena are not only related to molecular 
properties and forces in the foreground 
of nature, but they must also exist in con- 
tinuous correlation with the "unknown 
factor of evolution," — that Potential be- 
hind all material processes, and beyond 
all finite measurement, which evolution 
must everywhere presuppose. 

This advance of thought towards the 
unseen and the eternal, which proceeds 
from the deepening of our knowledge of 
nature, is itself to be regarded as one of 
the significant tendencies of the evolution 



86 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

of modern science. If one could start a 
shaft from the sunny surface of the earth, 
which should sink with constant descent 
into its depths, at the end of that ever- 
descending shaft would be at first dark- 
ness, and still lower down we hardly know 
what ; but if we can suppose such artesian 
shaft to be sunk, without stoppage in any 
impenetrable stratum of rock, down ever 
deeper, until it should reach clear through 
to the other side of the earth, the point of 
the shaft would come out once more into 
the sunlight on the skyward side of the 
world. At both ends would be opened the 
light of the day and the infinite heaven. 
Something like this already seems to be the 
case with man's research into the depths 
of material nature. Our thought starts 
from the light of our spiritual conscious- 
ness, and it ends with outlook towards 
the spiritual light. Unbelief is only a 
shaft sunk a little way down into the 
darkness. Our unbelief is a sign that our 
reason has not yet succeeded in working 
its laborious way clear through things. 
If it can keep on, in any investigation of 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 8T 

nature, and go far enough, it will find the 
sky again, — the same spiritual sky which 
we first looked up to in our childhood's 
happy trust. As one complete and 
rounded whole, nature lies ensphered in 
the Eternal Light. Already, indeed, as 
we have just indicated, our natural sci- 
ences in the descent of their inquiries into 
the ultimate nature of matter and the pro- 
found secrets of life, have gone so far that 
they seem to draw near to intimations and 
gleamings of some spiritual sphere and 
reality beyond. Our physics, which began 
by turning from all metaphysics, is itself 
creating a new metaphysics. Natural 
science is becoming a spiritualization of 
the material; our current conceptions of 
matter are sublimated and ethereal; at 
points only a thinnest crust seems to be 
left between the natural and the spiritual, 
between mortal darkness and the eternal 
light. 

We have now to consider more defi- 
nitely how the argument for our immortal- 
ity is affected by these general tendencies 



88 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

of thought towards the spiritual, which 
we have just described. It follows that in 
the present state of human knowledge and 
speculation we have at hand more material 
fit for refashioning into the philosophic 
argument for immortality, than Socrates 
could have possessed in the knowledge of 
his time. A Plato might discourse more 
divinely now, with the facts of science 
for his analogies, than he could reason 
when he had only the mythologies of his 
age for illustrations of his supernal ideas. 
This general material of the argument for 
our spiritual faiths, moreover, has been 
wrought into definite and attractive forms 
by several recent scientific philosophers. 
It will be necessary for us to review these 
reasonings, in order that we may pass on 
to the further extension of the argument 
for immortal life to which our present in- 
quiry points. 

One of the later scientific reinforce- 
ments of the philosophic argument for 
immortality has been drawn from the 
principle of continuity. This principle 
has been used by the authors of the Unseen 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 89 

Universe as the basis for the construction 
of an elaborate argument for the continua- 
tion of our life after death; and still fur- 
ther, with the help of other admitted 
physical truths, they have sought to ren- 
der conceivable the possibility of another 
sphere of existence connected with this, 
yet superior to it, in which we have now 
our spiritual birthright, and into which 
after death our life shall without personal 
loss be transformed. According to this 
view, death would become a transference 
of individual existence from this visible 
universe to some other order of things inti- 
mately connected with it. * The conclusion 
of their reasonings with regard to life in 
its connection with matter, they have 
expressed in this sentence: "In fine, we 
maintain that what we are driven to is 
not an under-life resident in the atom, but 
rather, to adopt the words of a recent 
writer, a Divine over-life in which we 
live and move and have our being, "f 
Their hypothesis that life, as well as mat- 

* Unseen Universe, p. 97, ed. 1886. 
t Ibid., p. 245. 



90 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

ter, has been developed from the Unseen, 
they hold to be the only possible method 
of avoiding a breach of the principle of 
continuity ; and to break with that would 
be to break with modern science. Death, 
they reason, in consistency with their sci- 
entific principles, will furnish no barrier 
to the intellectual development of the in- 
dividual; and they further conceive it to 
be possible that this whole material order, 
coming in time to an end of its available 
energy, may be ultimately resolved into 
the higher order, with which it is always 
related, and that in the final universe, 
which has never been unreal, though now 
unseen, this visible universe "may bury 
its dead out of sight." * 

We will not pursue further, nor pause 
to criticise, any portions of this interest- 
ing scientific speculation concerning the 
possible conditions and laws of our con- 
tinuous spiritual being ; it is enough for 
our present purpose to show by refer- 
ences to such opinions that science affords 
to some of her own votaries new points 
* Unseen Universe, p. 157, ed. 1886. 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 91 

of leverage for the argument of their 
faith. 

The authors of the Unseen Universe are 
physicists, and draw the material of their 
reasonings mainly from their acquaintance 
with the facts and hypotheses of modern 
physics. Their argument might in some 
parts of it be further illustrated and en- 
forced from recent biological materials. 
Thus Weismann's speculation concerning 
the natural immortality of the germ- 
plasm; his assertion of the continuity of 
life ; and his affirmation that " every indi- 
vidual alive to-day — even the very high- 
est — is to be derived in an unbroken line 
from the first and lowest forms, " * might 
lend additional force to the skilful reason- 
ings of these authors from the physical 
principles of the "conservation of mass," 
and of energy, and from the continuity of 
nature. It is a living as well as a physi- 
cal continuity. 

Another and interesting course of rea- 
soning has been pursued by Mr. John 
Fiske in his book on the Destiny of Man. 
* Essays upon Heredity, I., p. 161. 



92 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

He accepts the belief in the immortality of 
the soul as "a supreme act of faith in the 
reasonableness of God's work."* He was 
led to this supreme act of faith through 
the revelation, which finally came to him 
in his studies of evolution, that there are 
distinct intimations of a dramatic ten- 
dency in evolution, which culminates in 
man, and in the development of his 
exalted spiritual qualities. Darwinism, 
which seemed at first to degrade man, 
has in reality replaced him upon the 
throne of creation. This new exaltation 
of man as the goal toward which the 
whole dramatic movement of evolution 
has tended, this re-enthronement by evo- 
lutionary science of man as the head of 
creation, may best be described in Mr. 
Fiske's own words: "That which the pre- 
Copernican astronomy naively thought to 
do by placing the home of man in the 
centre of the physical universe, the Dar- 
winian biology profoundly accomplishes 
by exhibiting man as the terminal fact 
in that stupendous process of evolution 
* Destiny of Man, p. 116. 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 93 

whereby things have come to be what they 
are. In the deepest sense it is as true 
as it ever was held to be, that the world 
was made for man, and that the bringing 
forth in him of those qualities which we 
call highest and holiest is the final cause 
of creation." Of this new conception of 
man he writes : " When, after long hover- 
ing in the background of consciousness, 
it suddenly flashed upon me two years 
ago, it came with such vividness as to 
seem like a revelation."* He reasons, 
further, that "he who regards Man as the 
consummate fruition of creative energy, 
and the chief object of Divine care, is 
almost irresistibly driven to the belief 
that the soul's career is not completed 
with the present life upon the earth, "f 
He sees no more occasion for throwing 
away our belief in the permanence of the 
spiritual element in man, than there is 
reason to throw away our belief in the 
constancy of nature. "Now the more 
thoroughly we comprehend that process 

* Idea of God, p. xxi. 
t Destiny of Man, p. 111. 



94 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

of evolution by which things have come 
to be what they are, the more we are 
likely to feel that to deny the everlast- 
ing persistence of the spiritual element 
in Man is to rob the whole process of its 
meaning."* 

Such, in brief, is the argument for our 
immortality which forces itself upon 
the minds of many thoughtful observers, 
who take into their view the regular 
course and manifest tendency of evolu- 
tion considered as a whole. Investi- 
gators who are buried in the tasks of 
special observations may not discern these 
larger implications of their science, as one 
at the bottom of a tunnel can have only 
the narrowest horizon, and no outlook; 
but Mr. Fiske's conclusions in his Destiny 
of Man may be regarded as fairly repre- 
sentative of the faith which a scientific 
mind may reach, when it rises above the 
details of its measurements and out of its 
specializations, and surveys nature as one 
significant and rational process. Evolu- 
tion, when regarded as one persistent 
* Destiny of Man, p. 115. 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 95 

method, and when followed through the 
vast orbit of its movement, is seen to pro- 
ceed with sure intent, and with face 
which, though often veiled from us, is 
turned always one way and towards the 
same goal, from the dark mystery of all 
origins up to the glory that excelleth. So 
that the argument in general for the per- 
manent exaltation of man's spiritual being 
is not only, as Mr. Fiske puts it, a "su- 
preme act of faith in the reasonableness of 
God's work"; it is confidence especially 
in the reasonableness of the creation in 
relation to God's work in man, and for 
man, in his organization, capacities, and 
aptitudes for perfected life. 

The same processes in nature which 
impressed Mr. Fiske as indications of a 
dramatic tendency which finds its culmi- 
nating scene in man's destiny, impressed 
an eminent German botanist, Nageli, so 
profoundly as to lead him to assume "a 
principle of perfection " in organic evolu- 
tion.* Nageli, indeed, disclaims the in- 
troduction under this phrase of any mystic 
* Theorie der Abstammungslehre, p. 12. 



96 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

principle, and regards it as a formulation 
of purely mechanical processes. He de- 
fines it likewise as a principle of progres- 
sion. He regards perfection in nature as 
twofold, — a perfection of structure or 
form, and also a perfection of adaptation 
of any organism to its environment. But 
however we may determine the mechanical 
method in which the principle of perfec- 
tion in nature works, the recognition of it 
carries us beyond mechanics for its rational 
explanation. Whether we regard the ten- 
dency towards perfection as a consequence 
of forces external to the organism, work- 
ing under the law of natural selection ; or 
whether we incline to the views of Nageli, 
and other evolutionists, who would find 
internal causes of growth and variation 
within the organism, — the recognition of 
the fact that in some way nature works 
towards perfection involves the discern- 
ment of an immanent aim and a definite 
end in evolution. 

The significant facts, written large 
before the common observation of men, 
and written small, likewise, in the micro- 



PRESUMPTIONS OP IMMORTALITY 97 

scopic structure and definite, though 
unknown, determinants of the simplest 
organisms, are that life is wondrous ly 
persistent, and also that it persists 
towards perfection. Life will not con- 
sent to be subject unto death; it has 
manifestly come in some form to stay; 
and, being thus deathless in its energy, 
it will not stop nor tarry until it has pro- 
duced its perfect work. That work will 
be perfect both in its form and in its 
adaptation to environment. But, as Mr. 
Drummond has insisted in his chapter on 
"Eternal Life," perfect correspondence to 
environment is a scientific conception of a 
possible eternal life which finds fulfil- 
ment in the Christian conception of the 
perfection of the soul in knowing God.* 
That which we now see manifested is only 
the tendency toward perfection, — not as 
though in man's present existence it had 
" already obtained," or were " already made 
perfect." But we see nature "forgetting 
the things which are behind, and stretch- 
ing forward to the things which are before." 
* Natural Law in the Spiritual World, p. 221. 



98 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

The last perfection of structure may have 
been already reached in the spiritual nature 
which is embodied in man, — the living 
soul. But the perfection of adaptation to 
environment towards which, also, how- 
ever mechanically, all evolution tends, is 
not yet reached in the present relation of 
the soul and the body; the new adapta- 
tion, the perfection of adaptation, may be 
realized, and realized under a larger law 
of natural selection than we may yet com- 
prehend, in the body of the resurrection. 
We behold life struggling and marching 
on through advancing forms which become 
more highly organized in their structure, 
and which consequently are better fitted to 
survive in a larger and more varied range 
of adaptations ; we see life calling in and 
using both the gracious aid of sex, and 
the silent help of death, to enable it to 
gain new and more richly diversified form 
and color, until in man's nature it seems 
to reach a consciousness of its own worth 
beyond which it cannot go, and in which 
it aspires to continue, rejoicing in itself, 
forever. 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY \)\) 

In the development of plants and ani- 
mals, a variation from the parental form 
will reach in time a "selective value," 
as it is called, when it becomes con- 
siderable enough to be useful to the 
plant or animal in its effort to nourish or 
to protect itself. The variety is regarded 
as having obtained a "survival-value" 
also, when the advantage, which it has 
acquired, fits it to survive better than 
others around it. Man seems to have 
gained nature's final survival- value. For 
the only fitting end of the entire dramatic 
tendency of life, the crowning result of the 
whole struggle of existence, — the gain 
of which may justify all loss below it, 
— is the rise and perfection of a being 
whose life has acquired selective value for 
the powers of the world to come to seize 
upon, — a being who shall consequently 
attain to a survival- value beyond the reach 
of natural death. With a true interpre- 
tative insight into this continuous and 
irresistible principle of perfection in 
nature, we may regard it in its inner and 
real meaning as a tendency of nature 



100 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

towards immortality. The living soul of 
man seems to itself, and is declared by 
the perfect Man, in whom it came to its 
perfect realization, already to have " passed 
out of death into life," and to have the 
eternal life. Or to express again its inner 
consciousness of worth and power after 
the analogy of our biological science, the 
living soul has at length attained con- 
scious " survival- value " for immortality. 

The force of this argument for immor- 
tality from the tendency towards perfection 
in nature, is heightened by two further con- 
siderations, which are justified by the facts 
of life. The first relates to the value of 
sacrifice as a means, but not as an end, of 
life. Alike in our religious conception 
of it, and in the use of it in nature, sacri- 
fice is to be regarded as a means of life, 
which would forfeit its moral value, and 
lose all its beauty, if it should be chosen 
as an end of life. In evolution sacrifice 
appears to be a method followed by nature 
for the advantage of a species, or for the 
introduction of a higher order of organic 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 101 

development. Each evolutionary order 
is sacrificed, not as though nature took 
pleasure in sacrifices, or in the blood of 
bulls and goats, but for the benefit of the 
order above it, as though at any cost 
nature must press on to the goal, and win 
the crown of life. Thus the inorganic is 
broken up in order that from its dust the 
plant may spring and blossom ; the plant 
in turn gives up its fruit that the animal 
may be nourished; and the law of prey 
among animals is not to be regarded as 
a reckless thirst in nature for blood, 
but it indicates rather the existence of a 
scale of adaptations for offence and de- 
fence, and of a system of sacrifice and 
reprisal, by means of which on the whole 
vital organization is specialized, refined, 
rendered more agile and responsive, and 
eventually made meet for the kingdom of 
mind, to which man comes in the power of 
the spirit. 

The other consideration relates to the 
immanence in nature of this sacrificial 
tendency for the sake of perfection. This 
is not a discipline imposed upon nature 



102 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

from without; it is not a course of sacri- 
fice for the sake of higher survivals to 
which nature is with difficulty held by 
external compulsion; it is an instinct of 
nature's own heart. It might be called a 
constitutional law of nature's order; and 
as such it has the highest significance in 
any rational interpretation of the world. 
For it is thus seen to be, not an accidental 
or temporary contrivance, but a permanent 
and persistent tendency of life towards 
perfection. It is the working out of the 
indwelling and dominant principle of life 
in its outward evolution. A reaching 
towards perfection is the unconscious and 
instinctive attitude of nature. This is no 
"device"; it is an indwelling end of all 
evolution. 

"We simply project this immanent law 
and process of life into the future, and 
believe in its manifest destiny, when we 
hold that the sacrifice of life, which we 
now everywhere see manifested, shall 
eventually attain its end in a perfec- 
tion and joy of life which is not yet made 
manifest. Its apparently predetermined 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 103 

and inevitable result would be some order 
of life which, in the use of all below it, 
has itself passed beyond the need of sacri- 
fice for the sake of any conceivably higher 
life above it. From life's topmost bough 
the spirit takes wing, and soars and sings 
into "the heavenlies." Thus we are 
brought back again to the conclusion that 
the tendency of nature towards perfection 
is an upreaching towards an order, and 
range, and freedom of life, which shall not 
merely have sacrificial value for the sake 
of something beyond it, but also an eter- 
nal survival- value because it is fitted to 
live for the glory of God in the highest 
forever. 

We may use the glowing words of Mr. 
Fiske to describe the favorable point of 
view which we have now reached in the 
argument for immortality : — 

"According to Mr. Spencer, the divine 
energy which is manifested throughout 
the knowable universe is the same energy 
that wells up in us as consciousness. 
Speaking for myself, I can see no insuper- 
able difficulty in the notion that at some 



104 PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 

period in the evolution of Humanity this 
divine spark may have acquired sufficient 
concentration and steadiness to survive 
the wreck of material forms and endure 
forever. Such a crowning wonder seems 
to me no more than the fit climax to a 
creative work that has been ineffably 
beautiful and marvellous in all its myriad 
stages."* 

In these reasonings we are only apply- 
ing to the higher nature of man in its 
structural aptitudes the principle of the 
correspondence between faculty and en- 
vironment, which obtains as a constant 
law and a sure prophecy of coming life 
throughout the whole sphere and opera- 
tion of nature beneath man. The lung, 
developing from the gills of the fish, finds 
the clear air waiting above the water's 
surface to be breathed. The wing of the 
bird finds a buoyant element in which it 
may be safely spread. The eye, growing 
from some primitive spot of more sensitive 
pigment, when at last nature has finished 
it, finds the whole broad day waiting for 
* Destiny of Man, p. 117. 



PRESUMPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 105 

its opening. The existence in any creat- 
ure of a structural aptitude and a growing 
power is a scientific presumption of the 
existence also of some corresponding en- 
vironment, for which it has been selected 
and adapted. Lungs, or wings, or roots 
of the plant, would not be capacity for 
vital breath, or graceful flight, or swift 
motion, or fair blossoming, if nature were 
not true to her own prophecies, and did 
not justify her anticipations by making all 
things ready, and supplying in due time 
to each and every power of life its fitting 
and festal element. Without the com- 
pleting element, these organic faculties 
would be false prophesyings, — only un- 
intelligible anticipations of something 
unrealized as yet. Now if this principle 
hold true of all powers and functions of 
nature up to the life of man, why should 
it suddenly become false with man's di- 
vine faculty of thought, will, and love? 
Why should nature's uniform truth break 
its promise only to our human hearts? 
Why should this universal principle of 
adaptation of power to environment, by 



106 PKESUMPTIONS OF IMMOETALITY 

which we know that if the one be given 
the other also shall in time be made mani- 
fest, unexpectedly break short off with 
man's higher life and hope? We read 
alike in Scripture and in nature that there 
is a faithful Creator. Nature's gospel of 
life, — her mystery of grace, — long hid- 
den in the lowest organisms, but now 
revealed, to such as have eyes to see, in 
her highest manifestations of the Life, — is 
one gospel of hope, and it is true through- 
out. The existence of spiritual power 
within us is likewise presumption that 
some fitting environment waits for the 
spirit when it shall be perfected and set 
free. Or, as a prophet of old put it: God 
" worketh for him that waiteth for him." * 

* Is. lxiv. 4. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

THE general review in the previous 
chapter of the argument for immor- 
tality, as it may be advanced in the light 
of modern science, leaves before us the 
distinct possibility that in the living soul 
of man evolution may have reached a per- 
fection of life which is so far independent 
of its present physical embodiment that it 
can persist, and enter into other, though 
to us as yet unknown, relations with the 
universe. We have further seen the rea- 
sonable probability that this possible con- 
tinuance of spiritual life under new 
conditions to which it is adapted, shall 
be realized; as otherwise the whole pro- 
cess of evolution would fail of its evi- 
dent tendency towards perfection, and 
the entire history of life would be robbed 
of its rational interpretation. With the 
107 



108 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

advent of man, evolution closed its old 
testament, in which the selection and 
preservation of the chosen species had 
been the law of the kingdom, rather than 
the separation and perfection of the indi- 
vidual. It began with man its new testa- 
ment, in which the life — the true, the 
eternal kind of life — comes to its hour of 
individual calling and consciousness, and 
has its work of the Son, and not the ser- 
vant, given it to do in the Father's house. 
Like the world's second Bible, — the 
spoken word of God, — so also the first 
pictorial Scripture of nature — the reve- 
lation of life which, though not audibly 
spoken, was depicted and acted in the suc- 
cessive scenes and throughout the whole 
dramatic presentation of life on the earth 
— is to be read and interpreted as a book 
of prophecy which shall end in an apoca- 
lypse. Unless read as prophecy, the whole 
book of life becomes unintelligible. Nat- 
ure's prophecy of life ends with man and 
his future as its apocalypse. 

In the new course which evolution 
began with the advent of man, we see 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 109 

that almost immediately the field of ac- 
tion was changed, and in time older 
methods also of natural life became sub- 
ordinated to new modes of spiritual pro- 
cedure. The change of the field for the 
struggle of life was from the physical to 
the psychical, from the body, which is 
finished, to the soul, which has begun to 
live. Atomic matter seems to have been 
carried to the last possible degree of 
molecular serviceableness in the intricate 
subtleties of the human brain; and our 
evolutionists assure us that there is little 
reason to expect the appearance on this 
earth of any being of superior physical 
organization to man. Evolution, in one 
word, seems to be through with the body, 
when it has fairly begun with the soul. 
It has reached in our selfhood, conscious 
of its continuous identity, a new realm or 
order of existence; it has crossed the 
threshold, and stands as a child of the 
Eternal in the Father's presence. The 
same self-conscious being who preserves 
his moral identity through the incessant 
changes of the molecular processes with 



110 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

which his life is connected in this body, 
has already reached a point of spiritual 
independence, although not yet of com- 
plete detachment from atomic matter; that 
detachment, with possibility of new and 
better connection with the elemental 
forces, may be the last possible step in 
the evolution of the soul — the last trans- 
formation which is the beginning of the 
end and the possession of the final glory 
of life. 

This conception of man's increasing 
spiritual independence and perfectibil- 
ity, which science does not forbid, but 
which, on the contrary, fulfils its constant 
and ascending course of adaptations and 
selection, is the doctrine of the future 
survival of the soul which is declared in 
the Biblical revelation of the two orders, 
— the natural and the spiritual, — and the 
completion of the former in the latter. 
We read, " If there is a natural body, there 
is also a spiritual body." In the light of 
our science we may affirm that as the one 
order is part and product of evolution, so 
also shall the other be its end; nature's 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 111 

whole is large enough to include both. 
We read, " Howbeit that is not first which 
is spiritual, but that which is natural; 
then that which is spiritual. The first 
man is of the earth, earthy: the second 
man is of heaven." So also in the book 
of the history and the prophecy of life we 
read that the first chapter of evolution is 
of the earth; the second volume, which 
is not yet finished but only begun in our 
spiritual being and possibilities, is of a 
higher element. " And as we have borne 
the image of the earthy, we shall also bear 
the image of the heavenly." There is no 
breach of continuity ; it is all orderly and 
progressive ; it is life rising from the dust, 
and growing to its perfect flower and 
fruitage. And in this continuity of life, 
death also is recognized as necessary and 
useful, both in the inspired chapter of 
the resurrection, and in the Scripture of 
nature ; for do we not read in both : " Thou 
foolish one, that which thou thyself sow- 
est is not quickened, except it die "? 

Our recent biological science may fur- 
nish us at this point an analogy of help 



112 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

also to the spiritual imagination, if we 
endeavor to conceive of the life of the 
resurrection. In working out the theory 
of a separation in the process of organiza- 
tion between the cells of the body which 
are mortal, and the imperishable germ- 
plasm, which is regarded as the bearer of 
all the inherited and formative powers of 
the body, Weismann maintains that the 
living germ not only persists and is poten- 
tially immortal, but also that "under 
favorable conditions " it seems capable of 
surrounding itself with a new body. * This 
biological speculation is far from being 
accepted science, and we would build 
upon its tentative basis no religious su- 
perstructure. But as a conception, which 
is held to be admissible in a working- 
theory of biology, we may use it as an 
analogy in aid of the spiritual imagina- 
tion. With this biological conception in 
mind, even if it is no more than a scien- 
tific imagination, we may ask, if a vital 
germ can thus be supposed to gather 
around itself, from material elements 
* Essays upon Heredity, I., p. 123. 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 113 

under favorable conditions, a new and 
better body of life, what may not a spir- 
itual germ — the energy of a living soul 
— prove capable of selecting for its use, 
from elements still more ethereal, for the 
celestial body of its continued thought and 
love? 

The philosophic argument for immor- 
tality takes up the scientific presump- 
tions, which we have been reviewing, and 
sets them in the larger logic of the moral 
order of the universe; it finds the su- 
preme probability of life after death in the 
spiritual worth of life. It would carry 
us beyond the limits of our present more 
definite inquiry, should we seek to pur- 
sue this philosophic argument along those 
high and luminous ranges of reasoning 
where Plato walks, discoursing with the 
divine ideas ; and there follow him a noble 
company of minds, to whom, as to the 
Master of them all, it has been revealed 
that the life is more than the food which 
nature's age-long toil has prepared for it, 
and that man does not live by bread alone. 



114 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

But we may pause for a moment to observe 
somewhat more particularly how, at this 
point in our study of evolution, the philo- 
sophic argument for immortality may take 
a sure departure from the general pre- 
sumptions of evolutionary science. 

A definite and clear line of philosophic 
reasoning towards belief in immortality 
proceeds from the fact that life, as mani- 
fested in man's self-knowledge, has become 
an extra-physical potency. It is still in- 
woven with the meshes of fine molecu- 
lar changes; but it is a life which has 
escaped from bondage to a purely physical 
service. Mind does not now exist in 
a body merely as a physical adaptation 
for the better preservation of the body. 
Indeed, if mind were only a means for 
the better discharge of bodily functions, 
natural selection might long ere this have 
eliminated a too intense and consuming 
self-consciousness from the perfection 
of animal existence. Natural selection 
would dispense with an overgrowth of 
mind as a variation not advantageous to 
the physical well-being. To some degree 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 115 

natural selection among men works 
towards a reduction of mental develop- 
ment, although this tendency is interfered 
with and superseded in human history by 
a higher law of spiritual selection for 
more than physical uses. Consciousness, 
however, is not necessary to a discharge 
of the purely physical functions, and often 
too much of it seriously interferes with 
them. But it is necessary to the perfec- 
tion of man. His life is raised out of the 
physical process ; mind has no definite and 
observed materiality. When subjected 
to the most searching tests of physical 
analysis, mind is found to contain a re- 
sidual element — a reserved potency of 
being — which is known directly in the 
light of thought and in the glow of love. 
To the most expert mental physiology the 
mind of man remains like the mystery of 
the prophet's vision, — a creation more 
wonderful than nature's most complex 
mechanisms ; for the " spirit of the living 
creature was in the wheels." So far, then, 
from having reduced the world of man to 
nothing but dust and ashes, evolution pre- 



116 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

sents the universe to our philosophy as ex- 
isting in two kinds, — matter and spirit; 
the last testament of God in the creation 
is offered in these two kinds; the sacra- 
ment of the life is both bread and wine. 
Matter and mind are the emblems always 
with us of the real presence of the one 
unseen Lord of all. We must find the 
primal unity, for which all philosophy 
seeks, in the Giver, not in the gifts. 
The Lord is one God; and his creative 
word is one sentence ; but it is composed 
of a noun and a verb, each existing in re- 
lation to, and neither made perfect with- 
out, the other; it is both a substantive of 
body, and an action of the spirit; it is 
both conjoined, — the matter of life, and 
the energy of will. 

Neither need this philosophic argument 
for immortality be overburdened with 
difficulties which the imagination would 
throw upon it, in its inability to conceive 
of a continued life of the soul without 
some physical basis for its future exist- 
ence. The actuality of mind is the living 
fact which we know in our self-conscious- 



FESTAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 117 

ness; the conception of a material sub- 
stance is a doubtful idea, which we add to 
our experience of the actual existence and 
energy of the mind. But this imagina- 
tion of some physical substance, or mate- 
rial basis for the mind, is not necessary in 
reason to its actual presence and energy. 
Even in our modern physics the primary 
concepts of matter, light, and the ethereal 
transmission of energy, have become so 
attenuated that they elude the grasp of 
the common imagination of men. Mate- 
riality itself is becoming a vanishing 
point; energy is known to us as a living 
will. 8 It were a pure assumption to sup- 
pose that spirit must forever remain teth- 
ered to an atom. We do not know what 
now is the limit of its dependence upon 
atomic matter. Spiritual energy may 
have other carriage, and more ethereal con- 
veyance, than the motions of the molecules 
which it now makes subservient to its uses. 
No ignorance of the possible future envi- 
ronment of our spiritual being can offset 
present knowledge of its actual existence 
and energy. The philosopher, then, can- 



118 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

not be gainsaid by the physicist, when he 
affirms that the most exhaustive analysis 
of the last product of evolution, man's 
self-consciousness, reveals three extra- 
physical factors, — thought, love, and, as 
the union of these two, the personal will to 
live. These results, transcending as they 
do the physical, have been gained only 
through a long and strenuous struggle and 
toil of life ; each of them marks a victory 
over the sensuous and the material. 

Of the first result it is not enough to 
say that animal instinct comes to itself in 
man's reason. It is truer to affirm that 
the primal Intelligence — which formed 
the microscopic spindle, and wove the web 
of film, and divided with equal hand the 
mystic rods within the nucleus of the first 
living cell, and which throughout the 
whole development of nature has followed 
definite lines of variation, until in the 
human brain it has fashioned and fin- 
ished at last the exquisite mechanism of 
the molecules for the touch of thought 
and the play of the spirit — has itself 
become manifest in the life, and is in- 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 119 

carnate in the Son of man who knows the 
Father. 

Of the second of these ultimate results 
of evolution, love, it is not enough to 
say that the tendency towards maternity, 
which was hidden in the need of rejuve- 
nescence of the lowly protozoon, possessed 
of but a single cell, has come, after ages 
of waiting and of growth, to its fair con- 
summation in "the evolution of a mother." 
It is truer to affirm that the Word of 
Love, which was in the beginning with 
God, and which is God, has reached the 
supreme expression of its divine beatitude 
on earth in the holy mother and the child. 
"We love," — so said the disciple of the 
deepest insight, thus making his unlim- 
ited word true text for the genesis and 
history of all love, — " because he first 
loved us." The book of life, if read with 
the strict eye of the biologist, does not 
run, according to Mr. Drummond's happy 
phrase, "as a love story." It is not scien- 
tifically true that any ethical altruism can 
be discovered in the law of reproduction 
when considered as a natural law; for 



120 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

hunger and want — the hard imperative of 
nutrition — may have determined the first 
meeting of Protozoa, and it was no love 
match when one Amoeba first embraced 
and enclosed another as its food, although 
it may thereby have set in motion the 
mechanism for the subsequent division of 
itself into two daughter-cells. The low- 
est and the basest, as we deem it, lies at 
the root of the highest ; and love is always 
a transfiguration of the natural. But Mr. 
Drummond's characterization of the book 
of life as "a love story " has deeper truth 
in it when, in St. John's vision of the 
Spirit, the history of life from beginning 
to end is read as the one increasing and 
deepening story of the Love which was 
before it with the Eternal, and which, as 
the true Word, was the light of every man 
coming into the world. 

The third ultimate disclosure of our 
human consciousness, likewise, —the per- 
sonal will of life, — cannot be interpreted 
in the terms of physical energies. Into 
the spiritual will to live — the will to live 
on and worthily — thought brings its free- 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 121 

dom, and love pours all its deathless 
passion. The moral personality in its 
spiritual will and action becomes one of 
the great and permanent powers; it is 
an energy of formative and organizing 
potency, superior to any chemical energy 
which may build up or destroy the mole- 
cules of the body. It is not lightly to be 
dissolved by any changes or reactions of 
its environment. Man's spiritual will of 
life is more than the tendency towards 
the preservation of the species, which per- 
vades the mute unconscious prophesying 
of nature's struggle for existence. It is 
an acquisition of a higher tendency; it is 
the attainment of a definite and formative 
energy — a constructive and reconstructive 
spiritual determination. It is a personal 
will to live always and worthily, which 
not only characterizes man in his achieve- 
ment or his heroism ; it does not fail him, 
it reveals often its transcendent virtue, in 
the hour of his weakness and his mortality. 
For man does not die as the animal dies ; 
death comes not to him as an accident to 
which he submits in passive dissolution ; 



122 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

it is an event of life which he will meet 
with a foreseeing and concentrated energy 
of his spirit. The brute that perishes 
wanders from the herd, and lies down in 
the forest by itself to die; man gathers 
his friends about him, and with memories 
and hopes of love given and received, he 
passes on, greeting his future. Man will 
take thoughtful part in his own dying, and 
show spiritual possession of himself as he 
passes hence. "Man," said Pascal, in 
one of his profoundest Thoughts, "knows 
that he dies." His departure seems at 
times, when a great, clear soul goes before 
us, as the march and the triumph of a spirit 
into the unseen and the eternal. This 
spiritual supremacy over death was wit- 
nessed in its supernal manifestation, when 
He whose will of life had been to do the 
Father's will, was nailed to a Cross, and 
who, when he had cried with a loud voice, 
said, " Father, into thy hands I commend 
my spirit: and having said this, he gave 
up the ghost." 

When known and interpreted together 
as the living unity of consciousness, these 



FINAL DISCHAEGE OF DEATH 123 

three, — thought, love, and the personal 
will to live always and worthily, — present 
to philosophy a final extra-physical product 
and issue of the whole evolution of life. 
It is not merely a last flower on the tree 
of life, blooming but to decay; it is life's 
ripe fruit which contains within itself the 
seed of a new beginning. And if we 
keep our thought simply true to our self- 
knowledge, it is perceived to be the seed 
of the spiritual order which has been sown 
in the natural; it is the beginning on 
earth of the heavenly. In this living per- 
sonality Life is raised to its highest power, 
and is possessed in itself of energy which 
the outward universe may not destroy. 
The matter of all the spheres shall wait to 
do it service. It is that "Holy One," 
which " cannot see corruption. " * Of Him 
all the prophets and apostles of Life from 
the beginning declare that " it is not pos- 
sible " that He should be holden of death, f 

* Acts ii. 24-27. 

t This reasoning from the personal will to live the 
author has presented somewhat more fully in its ethi- 
cal implications in his Personal Creeds, pp. 134-141, 
and Christian Ethics, pp. 336-339. 



124 FINAL DISCHARGE OP DEATH 

We have thus reached a position where 
the lines of the argument for immortality, 
hitherto generally advanced, have come to 
a close. With these scientific presump- 
tions in mind, and in the strength of the 
philosophic argument for immortality from 
the worth of personal life and in view of 
the moral order of the world, we are now 
ready to proceed again in the direction of 
our present more specific inquiry concern- 
ing the use and function of death. One 
further and confirmatory step will be ren- 
dered possible, if we turn now to the 
facts and conclusions which we gained in 
our first two chapters. Taken together 
with one other law of nature, still to be 
mentioned, which our evolutionary sci- 
ence has disclosed, we shall see that the 
natural law of the utility of death opens 
before us still another intimation of im- 
mortality. 

We have already observed that death 
enters at a point of service for life. It 
is advantageous to the preservation of the 
species that certain organized forms should 
be left by the wayside to perish. Under 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 125 

the law of natural selection the rein- 
forced cells survive; with the admission 
of the improved method of fertiliza- 
tion, the unfertilized cells are gradually 
dropped, and after living awhile to them- 
selves alone, they naturally die. More- 
over, in organisms which have acquired a 
body composed of several cells (Metazoa), 
and in which distinctions of sex are more 
marked, death has become the rule. It 
is the price, we are told, which is "paid 
for a body," and such animals "die be- 
cause they have to reproduce."* Hence 
both sex and death take place and rank 
among nature's utilities. Death, then, has 
reason in it, so long as it has use. Death 
has a selective and adaptive function to 
fulfil, so long as sex continues to repro- 
duce, to elevate, to enhance and beautify 
life. Shall there come a time — is there a 
pitch and perfection of spiritual organiza- 
tion to be reached — when neither of these 
first friends and helpmeets of life shall be 
longer needed? Shall life at last attain 

* The Evolution of Sex, Geddes and Thomson, 
pp. 255, 260. 



126 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

a freedom and perfection where the con- 
stant attendance of these two servants, 
sex and death, shall be no longer useful, 
and may therefore be dispensed with? 

We know that it is a principle of evolu- 
tion that an organ through disuse may 
become rudimentary. Without raising at 
this point the question, which is still 
mooted between different schools of biolo- 
gists, how a functionless organ may lapse, 
and eventually be disinherited, it is 
enough for our purpose to point to the 
admitted fact that nature does not keep 
too long in her economy any useless ser- 
vant. In the higher animals muscles and 
bones, and entire structures, which were 
advantageous to organisms lower down, 
have become rudimentary, and in some 
instances have disappeared. Ceasing to 
have " selection-value, ' ' — value of advan- 
tage in the maintenance and struggle of 
existence, — they lose "survival- value," 
and tend to disappear. There is a silent, 
yet constant, process of elimination in 
nature, which ever accompanies the posi- 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 127 

tive process of evolution. What nature 
has no further use for, — give her time, 
and she will bury it out of sight. It is a 
part of the intelligent economy of nature 
to reduce the useless to its lowest possible 
terms. Throughout nature the Life is 
ever proclaiming to those who have ears 
to hear, "Follow me; let the dead bury 
their dead." 

In view, then, of this law of the dimi- 
nution and ultimate disappearance of the 
useless from the order and employ of 
nature, we may at once raise the further 
presumption whether death likewise shall 
not be discarded, if ever there shall arise 
a being so constituted and so endowed 
that his further subjection to death would 
cease to be useful to the ends of life ? It 
will also be antecedently probable that, if 
in the ascent of life a height and perfec- 
tion is reached where sex shall be no 
longer advantageous, and therefore may 
be discarded, the distinctions of sex will 
then vanish; and hence at that same 
point, through that same door opening 
into life's further perfection, death also 



128 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

with sex shall go out, never to return 
again. The question, therefore, of our 
immortality assumes this new form and 
takes on this further natural probability, 
as it may now be put in this more specific 
way: Has not the evolution of life, 
through sex and death, among other 
means, reached in our spiritual being and 
possibility that kind of existence, that 
point of perfection, intended from the 
beginning, in which it has become capa- 
ble of surviving the death of a body no 
longer fitted to its use, and of persisting 
afterwards in some other form and rela- 
tionship, in which it shall no longer need 
death or regeneration to help it further on ? 
Or, to put in other phrasing the same 
thought of death: Has not life in our 
spiritual nature gone already so far as to 
have no more need of dying in order that 
in others beyond us the fulness of life may 
be attained ? Death, we may see and be- 
lieve, as the means of disentangling this 
body, in which the old order ends, from 
the spiritual, in which the new order 
begins, must still have place and func- 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 129 

tion ; and hence it remains a mortal neces- 
sity for us all; but after the dissolution 
of this mortality, it will have no more 
dominion over us, for it can be of no fur- 
ther service or use in carrying forward 
life to its perfection. There shall be for 
the perfected life of spirits no need of an 
endless series of transformations, of births 
and rebirths ; individual deaths will not be 
needed for the preservation of the species 
of perfected spirits, for death shall have 
fulfilled all possible function when this 
mortal shall have been left behind, and, 
as no longer useful, even according to the 
principle of natural selection, death will 
have disappeared forever. 

For this conclusion there is an immense 
presumption at least in our spiritual favor 
from the natural history of life and of 
death. For it is only reasoning that in 
this respect, as in others, nature will be 
proved to be of one piece ; that the end of 
her processes shall be in accordance with 
her beginnings; that the same intelli- 
gence which is observed in her initial 
utilities will be found also to seal and to 



130 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

consummate her ultimate utilities. If, 
then, death can be proved to have come in 
under the law of natural selection and for 
use, under the same law, when it is no 
longer useful, it may rationally be sup- 
posed that it shall go out. It shall disap- 
pear through the door exactly opposite that 
through which it entered; for its course 
has been throughout straightforward, de- 
termined by the same principle and end 
in nature ; for use it came, and because no 
longer useful it goes out. Utility and 
uselessness — these opposite points mark 
its entrance and its exit ; — and its whole 
mission lies as an intelligible service be- 
tween this beginning and this end of it. 
Death, we have been observing, was not 
introduced at the outset for the sake of 
annihilating life, but that it might help 
and hasten life on, until it should reach 
its present point of comparative indepen- 
dence in our spiritual being. Up to us, 
and up to the extent of its service in 
breaking down, and in time removing 
from sight every worn and senescent body 
of this flesh, death has been naturally use- 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 131 

ful, and it fulfils faithfully its appointed 
function; but it would not be advanta- 
geous to us personally, or to the spiritual 
ends of further life, when largely con- 
ceived, should death follow life farther, 
beyond the body and into the soul. When 
it comes close to our minds, our powers of 
thought, our capacity of immortal love, 
death, in the sense of their definite arrest, 
or a final annihilation of their identity, 
would become an enemy; it would lose 
its character, and cease to be the natural 
friend of life which it has always been. 
In the end, therefore, its work done, it 
shall be discharged. It shall no more 
have dominion over us. 

This discharge and ultimate disappear- 
ance of death for the human race as a 
whole may be a process which shall re- 
quire a whole world-age for its comple- 
tion; as nature always takes time to 
render any organ functionless and rudi- 
mentary. But the present reigning of 
death, according to this view, is the ap- 
pointed time and process of its gradual 
completion of its work and the ending of 



132 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

its stewardship. When shall death be no 
more ? The Scripture answers, when the 
Lord of life shall come, then the reign of 
perfect life shall be manifested. From 
our science of the law of the service of 
death, the answer is echoed back, — death 
shall go when no longer useful for life. 
When will death cease to reign ? When 
life can better go on without death, but 
not till then. So long as it can help, 
death, life's servant, shall remain, doing 
God's will. So long as the human race 
needs in this way of suffering to be made 
perfect, God will keep death in his earthly 
employ. But God will keep no servant 
in his house, when the service is no longer 
required for his household. It is contrary 
to the divine economy of force, which 
nature teaches, to keep anything beyond 
its appointed use. The economy of the 
creation dismisses useless servants. The 
goodness of the Lord of all will put a stop 
to death also, when He can do no more 
good through it. 

The Biblical doctrine of the resurrection 
assures us that at last death shall be swal- 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 133 

lowed up of life. It will disappear in the 
abounding life. Death, we are told, shall 
be no more. Then, at last, when life in 
its spiritual renewal and power shall have 
gained the heights of immortality, the 
ladder may be cast aside up which it has 
climbed, — the long, arduous ladder of 
life, in which birth and death, and life 
again, have been the ever-recurring 
rounds. 

One other feature of the Biblical dis- 
closure of immortal life arrests at this 
point our attention ; it is a feature which 
corresponds with singular truthfulness to 
an aspect of the law of death in nature 
which our science is unveiling. We have 
already noticed the close and even star- 
tling connection between the entrance of 
death and of sex into life, and the con- 
stant relation also of these two methods 
of the reproduction and advancement of 
life. The one attends the other through- 
out life, from the first rudimentary begin- 
nings in the Protozoa up to the purest joy 
and the deepest sorrows of human homes. 
The connection throughout nature between 



134 FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 

death and sex is so intimate, so constant, 
so mutually serviceable, that it is not 
going too far to say that the one probably 
could not have existed without the other. 

If we object to the presence of the one 
in nature, we must give up the hope of 
the other. God has joined the two to- 
gether in the service of life, and for its 
final glory, which is His glory. Now the 
Scriptural fact, which this connection 
renders strikingly significant, is that in 
the same word in which the Christ an- 
nounces the end of the reign of death, he 
declares the end, likewise, of the reign of 
sex: they both belong to this world, and 
shall cease, as no longer of service, in the 
realm of the spiritual. As nature an- 
nounces the entrance of both at the same 
time into the world, so the gospel of the 
resurrection announces the departure of 
both together from the heavenly life: 
"For in the resurrection they neither 
marry, nor are given in marriage, but are 
as angels in heaven." * 

Life, having drawn from nature its sub- 
* Matt. xxii. 30. 



FINAL DISCHARGE OF DEATH 135 

tlest essence, and having been endowed 
with the last and richest gifts of the 
creation, being already raised in man, both 
male and female, to the spiritual inde- 
pendence of a child of God, and possessed 
of the potencies of thought and of love in 
the highest, when through suffering and 
death it shall at last be made perfect, will 
have need no more in its immortality of in- 
crease or of diminution, of generation or 
of regeneration, of marriage or of being 
given in marriage ; for love shall be made 
complete, and what God hath already 
joined together in the fidelities and the 
joy of human hearts and human homes 
shall continue, beyond power of time or 
death henceforth to put asunder; for in 
the resurrection they are as the angels of 
God in heaven. 



CHAPTER V 

THE BIOLOGICAL AND THE BIBLICAL 
VIEW OP DEATH 

ONE of the difficulties which has ren- 
dered the theological mind reluc- 
tant to accept the evidence in behalf of 
the theory of evolution, is the apparent 
divergence between the evolutionary idea 
of the rise of man, and the Biblical narra- 
tive of his creation and his fall. We are 
concerned in this essay with this diver- 
gence of view only so far as it relates to 
the origin and the use of natural death; 
but the principles which we shall follow 
in comparing the Biblical and the evolu- 
tionary views of the law of death may be 
applied also to other points of resemblance 
or difference between scientific and Bibli- 
cal teachings. 

In the conception of death which we 
have derived from a biological study of it, 
136 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 137 

it is regarded as part of the natural ecc-n- 
onry of life; in the conception of death 
which we derive from the narrative of the 
fall in the Bible, it is represented as a 
punishment in the moral economy of 
man's history. The two conceptions are 
divergent, because they are reached from 
different levels and from distant points 
of view. The two representations are 
different, but not conflicting, because they 
depict the same great range of facts, 
although not in the same way or under 
the same light. An attempt to harmonize 
them by laying the one representation over 
the other, and seeking to make their vari- 
ant lines match, would succeed no better 
than have most of the labored endeavors 
to reconcile religion and science by artifi- 
cial harmonies of Genesis and geology. 

Not by reading science and the Bible as 
two parallel columns of revelation, which 
must be made exactly to correspond, are 
we to do justice to the truth of either, or 
to discover their real relation and mutual 
helpfulness. The right method, and the 
only profitable method, is to determine the 



138 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

position which each has gained, and to 
observe the aspect of the world and of the 
life of man which has been opened up 
from each point of view. Then we may- 
be able to compare different conceptions, 
to determine further whether two specta- 
tors have been surveying the same range 
of facts, and to judge also whether obser- 
vations taken from approaches so far apart 
may be comprehended in one larger knowl- 
edge of the truth. 

The scientific approach to the whole 
subject of the origin and law of death is 
entirely from the side of natural law, and 
it follows exclusively the course of the 
natural development of life. It proceeds 
with instruments of exact measurement, 
and traces the processes of nature from 
antecedent to consequent as one orderly 
and measurable evolution. Whenever it 
reaches a point where its measuring chain 
can be carried no further, and beyond 
which there lies something vast and vague, 
which cannot be quantitatively deter- 
mined, then it has found the limits of its 
field, — positive science has no concern 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 139 

with the immeasurable. Any antecedent 
which cannot be followed into its conse- 
quent, or any consequent which has no 
determinable antecedent, would lie beyond 
the range of purely scientific investiga- 
tion. The super-physical lies beyond the 
telescope, and beneath the microscope, 
although it may be near as thought to 
the mind, and close as love to the heart. 
When therefore in a scientific way we 
reach the conclusion that death falls into 
the line of evolution, and is an adapta- 
tion to the further ends of life, we have 
thereby apprehended the law of death from 
one distinct side of our possible knowl- 
edge of it. It is precisely the view of 
death which discloses itself to an eye 
looking from the level of the principle of 
natural selection, and following the courses 
of natural law. Beyond this and above it 
biology as a science cannot go. More- 
over, so far as the strictly scientific view 
extends, death is seen to fulfil the same 
function in the life of man which it is 
found to have discharged in the evolution 
of life below man. This determination, 



140 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

however, of the natural function of death 
does not prevent or contradict any other 
possible meaning and use of it, which may 
be discovered when it is contemplated in 
its relation to some other economy than 
that of the physical order. 

The Biblical point of view, on the con- 
trary, is moral and religious; when re- 
garded from that direction, there is no 
occasion for determining with exactness 
its natural place and use. The motive 
of the Biblical narrative is man's relation 
to the moral law, and what is observed is 
the work of death also under that law. 
The Biblical concern with the universal 
fact of death is a human concern with it, 
— what is its significance in the moral 
destiny of man ? 

The entire unconcern of the Biblical nar- 
rative about the existence of death before 
man in the world, is to be explained from 
this definition of its point of view. The 
scope of its survey is limited by the aim 
of its teaching to the human interest in 
death. It is a part of the providential 
order of man's history that the human 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 141 

interest, which is also the religious, 
always precedes a purely scientific inter- 
est in things. The human, religious con- 
cern with life and death is first and last ; 
the intellectual interest is intermediate. 
Hence in the first chapters of Genesis the 
connection of the law of death with the 
law of sin is the central and absorbing 
topic. The chosen prophets of humanity 
can remain unobserving and uninterested 
spectators of the prevalence of death 
throughout the animal creation, because 
they are supremely concerned with the 
entrance of death into the tragedy of 
human history. This human and reli- 
gious interest, which comes naturally first 
in man's life and in his Bible, may lead 
in time to an intellectual interest, and 
even provoke a spirit of scientific inquiry. 
We find the manifestations of this ten- 
dency within the covers of the Bible itself 
in some of the Wisdom-literature, which 
was not excluded from the Old Testament. 
When later on, in the increase of knowl- 
edge, man comes to take a general scien- 
tific interest in the world about him, and 



142 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

with curious intellect searches out its oc- 
cult processes and laws, his science may 
seem for a while to conflict with his faith; 
in reality it will prove to be only an in- 
termediate knowledge between his primi- 
tive and his final trust in the Eternal. 
If, then, as one result of this leisurely 
and protracted study of the outward world, 
the universal prevalence of death shall 
become more intelligible as an orderly fact 
and utility of nature, then the gaining of 
this new view from a different interest in 
]ife is not to be regarded as a necessary 
abandonment of the older faith; on the 
contrary, it may prove to be a needed com- 
plement to it, — a departure from it which 
returns enriched to it. The new view 
may enable us to set the moral relations 
of death to man in some larger interpreta- 
tion. The Biblical view of death may be 
found to extend the lower view of its 
natural function and use, instead of con- 
tradicting it. It may show that as an 
original adaptation of nature it has also 
aptitudes for higher use in the moral and 
spiritual order of the world. 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 143 

No one would expect, indeed, to find an 
exact correspondence between a picture 
of a landscape which had been taken on 
the level of the scene depicted, and another 
view of it which is opened as one looks 
down from a mountain-top. The same 
facts will be observed, but in a different 
perspective, and in a changed light. But 
though the two pictures cannot be har- 
monized in the sense of being made to 
overlap and correspond, line for line, and 
point by point, we may expect that in both, 
however different may be the perspective, 
the color, or the light thrown upon the 
scene, we shall recognize the same general 
features, and know that we have two dif- 
ferent views of the same watercourses, 
fields, or villages. The one view will not 
belie the other. Similarly, the natural 
and the Biblical view of death may be seen 
to complete each other. These two state- 
ments hold true of the moral conception of 
death, which theology gains chiefly from 
the Bible, and the view of it to be ob- 
served on the level of a scientific survey 
of the facts; viz., (1) the moral view of 



144 THE TWO VIEWS OP DEATH 

the function of death does not remove or 
deny the landmarks of the natural law of 
death; (2) the later scientific knowledge 
of it further shows how the natural func- 
tions of death may fit into and subserve its 
uses in the moral order. The moral and 
religious idea, reflected downwards, will 
not throw confusion over the scientific 
observation; and the truth observed in 
nature, reflecting its light upwards, will 
serve to clarify and illustrate the moral 
and spiritual conception. 

Thus it is true that there is nothing in 
the Biblical conception of the moral func- 
tion of death which conflicts with the ap- 
pearance of death as a fact in nature, or is 
incompatible with the part which it is 
seen to play in the natural development of 
life. As closely related and successive 
steps in the course of moral development, 
the narratives of the Book of Genesis bring 
out these primal and dominant facts : the 
spiritual beginning of the creation; the 
orderly process of it through a succession 
of creative days; the introduction of life 
from God; the differentiation of sex in 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 145 

nature, and especially in man; the fall, 
the awakening to moral consciousness, 
and the entrance of death (after man had 
been made male and female); and still 
further the acquired character of death for 
man as a penalty for his sin. Death be- 
comes, as it was not originally, a terror 
and a curse ; it wears henceforth a puni- 
tive aspect to man's guilty conscience. 
None of these primal facts of the creation 
are described in the Biblical narrative 
exactly as one writing a natural history 
of the world would see and define them ; 
— indeed, our most recent biology is not 
equal to the task of writing an exact nat- 
ural history of the origins of things; — 
but in the Bible these facts are seen and 
described in their moral connections, and 
as one writing a moral history of life 
would depict them. The only question 
to be raised between these two different 
descriptions, so far as the law of death is 
concerned, is this: Is there anything in 
the natural origin and function of death 
which would prevent it from acquiring 
the further moral function which is as- 



146 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

eribed to it in the Bible ? But, when put 
in this way, the question would seem to 
answer itself. It will repay, however, 
more definite elucidation. 

There are two ways in which natural 
death may acquire a new function as a 
part of the moral order, so that it may be 
truly represented as introduced for a moral 
purpose, and as subserving a moral end. 
Already existing as an adaptation for a 
natural use, it may be seized upon by the 
higher law of spiritual selection, and 
fitted to a moral use; and also when so 
used in connection with moral powers, 
it may receive an increased retroactive 
energy as a natural force. An animal 
appetite, for example, when taken up into 
the higher relations of human affection 
and care, may become a means of blessing, 
or a curse; and, moreover, by its moral 
reactions the processes of the animal life 
may themselves be changed for better, or 
for worse if the natural appetite be mor- 
ally abused. Appetite, thus, in the life 
of man plays a more important part either 
for good or evil than it can possibly do in 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 147 

the life of animals. It is often true that 
a natural factor may be raised to a moral 
energy, and become a bane or a blessing. 
So death in the life of man may acquire 
secondary moral character; and this sec- 
ondary character may become in time even 
more pronounced than its original natural 
function. 

Such acquired adaptations of natural 
processes to spiritual uses are in accord- 
ance with a certain principle of economy 
which is seen to obtain both in the nat- 
ural and the spiritual spheres. The 
Creator does not seem to call forth two 
principles in nature to do the work of one; 
a new factor is not introduced until it is 
needed to carry forward a process which 
existing factors can bring no further. 
Scientifically, this might be designated 
as the law of the economy of means in 
nature. Theistically, it might be named 
as the law of spiritual reserve in nature 
and history. More spiritual energy is not 
imparted at any one moment in the crea- 
tive and redemptive order than is required 
for the work to be done. This principle 



148 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

of economy is illustrated by the develop- 
ment of beauty in nature: and we will 
dwell upon this example of it in order 
that this principle of divine procedure 
may be distinctly apprehended. Darwin- 
ism has taught us that the line of beauty 
is the line of utility. For a considerable 
length, no doubt, a striking coincidence of 
these two lines, that of advantage to the 
preservation of the species, and that of 
adornment and protective coloration, may 
be observed. We should be far from ad- 
mitting, however, that this coincidence 
extends throughout the whole range and 
rule of the beautiful in nature. There is 
an overplus of beauty in nature, which it 
is difficult to explain from any known 
facts of its utility for the fertilization of 
seeds, or for any protective mimicry of 
animal forms and colors. A theistic argu- 
ment, to which full justice has not yet 
been done in the books, is to be drawn 
from the existence of this overplus of 
beauty in nature beyond any known ad- 
vantage of it to life. The excess of beauty 
— the ornamentation of nature beyond her 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 149 

vital uses — indicates that the beauti- 
ful exists for its own sake as an end in 
nature, and consequently for the delight of 
some Intelligence, from whose counsels of 
perfect form, true curvature, and harmony 
of all colors it proceeds. These two 
aspects of beauty in nature, that of use 
and that of ornamentation, are distinct as 
is the beauty of the curve of a sword- 
blade, which results from its perfect adap- 
tation to its use, and the added beauty 
of ornamentation, which may have been 
traced on its hilt and along the side of the 
blade. 

It would carry us too far afield to fol- 
low through the flowers and among the 
colors of animals, as well as along the 
creation's high architectural lines, this 
theistic argument from the prevalence and 
superabundance of the beautiful ; our pres- 
ent reference to it concerns only the illus- 
tration which it furnishes of the principle 
of economy in nature. Thus the sharp 
curve of a sword-blade subserves at one 
and the same time a double purpose, — it 
is exactly the curve best fitted for its use, 



150 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

and also it is a line of beauty. Through- 
out nature, to a considerable extent, but 
by no means universally, the two princi- 
ples of utility and of beauty are seen to 
be coincident. 9 So nature economizes both 
in energy and in structure. Similarly, on 
the same principle of adaptive economy, a 
natural process may subserve also a moral 
end, and a natural law may carry a moral 
purpose. Thus death first entering as a 
natural adaptation for the benefit of life, 
and continuing as a means of natural de- 
velopment, may at the same time become 
the conveyance of a moral intent, and ful- 
fil also the work of the moral law. The 
higher moral order fits into the grooves of 
the natural order, and for a long distance 
its wheels, bearing the burden and the 
destiny of the moral history of man, may 
run along the fixed courses of nature. 

Now it is precisely this over-use, so to 
speak, this further moral utility, of the 
natural course of death, which is brought 
into prominence in the Biblical narrative. 
It is solely with the acquired moral char- 
acter of death that the Biblical Genesis has 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 151 

to do. The Scriptural narrative, and St. 
Paul's commentary upon it, teach that 
after the introduction of sex, the fall of 
man, and the knowledge of good and evil 
consequent upon Adam's sin, the life of 
the human race entered upon a course of 
retribution and redemption, in which 
death became the first curse, as well as the 
last gain of nature, for the life of the 
spirit. As the first fear of death followed 
Adam's sin, and fear entered into the 
world through sin, so the hope of life and 
the thought of dying as gain became the 
consummation of the Christian apostle's 
faith. Death thus in the moral order de- 
notes a spiritual crisis; it may usher in 
life's last fear, or life's great expectation. 
But this spiritual use of it fulfils its 
natural law. For natural death likewise 
marks a critical point of evolution. The 
occurrence of death in nature, as we have 
seen, indicates that a decisive point has 
been reached in the development of life ; 
and its earliest known working is closely 
associated with the differentiation of life 
into increased and more fruitful com- 



152 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

plexity. The possibility also of a fall and 
degeneration becomes a natural possibility 
in the course of the increasing specializa- 
tion of life. Nature by the growing 
instability of her higher organic combi- 
nations furnishes material of life which 
grows ever more plastic for some future 
free choice. With this possibility of the 
fall of man, natural death offers itself as 
the means and the sign already furnished 
by nature for the ends of the moral order. 
Thus through sin death enters into the 
world, and sin reigns in death,* — as 
death had never entered, and never had 
been known in the world, until through 
fear of it men became all their lifetime 
subject to bondage, f 

The readiness with which the natural 
event of death falls into this Biblical use 
of it, may be seen by considering more 
closely the intimation just given that the 
fear of death constitutes the larger part of 
its moral consequence. Fear is a char- 
acteristic which natural death may easily 
acquire when life has gone so far as to 
* Rom. v. 12, 21. t Heb. ii. 15. 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 153 

attain to the possession of a conscience. 
The contrast between the fear for life 
which leads an animal to fly from imme- 
diate peril, and the human fear of death is 
at this point instructive. As we have 
before observed (p. 47) animals are not 
subject to the anxiety which we may 
suffer in anticipation of death; and 
Mr. Wallace is probably right when he 
says that "their constant watchfulness 
against danger, and even their actual 
flight from an enemy, will be the enjoy- 
able exercise of the powers and faculties 
they possess, unmixed with any serious 
dread." * Death, which as a natural event 
may thus occur without its approach being 
feared or its consequences dreaded, becomes 
the moral crisis around which the alarms 
of conscience may be gathered. Natural 
death, by reason of its sometimes sudden 
occurrence and by the mystery of its in- 
evitable change, as well as on account of 
nature's inability at once to bury her dead 
out of sight, becomes in man's knowledge 
of it the momentous fact, in anticipation 
* Darwinism, p. 37. 



154 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

of which conscience arouses the soul's 
mortal fear of offended justice, and sends 
the spirit of man as a suppliant to the 
power of an infinite grace. In this im- 
pressive moral use and aspect of it, there- 
fore, the Bible has right and truth in 
connecting natural death with the curse 
of sin and with the need of redemption. 

Moreover, in this connection it is a fact 
of luminous meaning that the course of 
redemption tends gradually to divest death 
of this moral consequence which it re- 
ceives from man's fear of it, and to drop 
it back once more to its primitive place 
and original function in the benign pro- 
cess of ascending life. In the Christian 
hope of endless life death loses its ac- 
quired character as a curse, and becomes 
to faith a natural and often happy transi- 
tion to another and better life. It is seen 
to be a part and step in the progress and 
perfecting of spiritual life. The descent 
into the valley of the shadow of death is 
a conception which belongs to the Old 
Testament. The sepulchre in the garden, 
with the stone rolled away, and the pres- 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 155 

ence of the angel of the Lord making 
bright the darkness of the tomb, is the 
sign of the New Testament gospel of 
the risen and ascending life. Death to 
the Christian conscience, becoming nat- 
ural again, loses fear. "Perfect love 
casteth out fear."* With fear cast out, 
death becomes as the gate of life; and 
such in the lower order of nature we have 
seen it to be, — a further way of life. So 
again in our moral consciousness, as in 
nature, death lies near to birth; and the 
first Christians, clothing themselves in 
white, commemorate the days when their 
martyrs died as the festivals of their birth- 
days into the eternal life. 

The Biblical doctrine of death as a con- 
sequence of sin runs in still another groove 
of the course of natural law ; for there is to 
be observed through the life of man a retro- 
active working of sin upon the physical 
process of death. Sin may render death 
naturally more evil ; its reaction may tend 
to make it an actual curse. The inti- 
mate connection between mind and matter 
* 1 John iv. 18. 



156 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

involves not only effects of physical con- 
ditions upon mental states, but also reac- 
tions of the mental and moral life upon 
the physical well-being. These reactions 
of the higher upon the lower life, accumu- 
lating through the courses of heredity, be- 
come notably marked in the transmission 
of the physical consequences of continued 
disobedience to nature's first command- 
ment of a pure life. By these reactions, 
inherited and accumulated in the flesh and 
the blood of the race, death ma}^ acquire 
a retributive character which was not at 
first natural to it; and thus, in its second 
nature, it becomes the curse of sin. It is 
true, on the other hand, that the extreme 
specialization of living matter in the body 
and the brain of man, and the unstable 
complexity of his organization, capable as 
it is of adapting itself to the widest range 
of external conditions, render man liable 
to new and ever-changing attacks from the 
outer world upon his physical integrity; 
that the very perfectness of his being ex- 
poses him to peril of worse suffering and 
more awful death. But we cannot affirm 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 157 

that this greater exposure of his organiza- 
tion might not have been compensated by 
his keener intelligence and his recupera- 
tive spiritual energy, if sin had not thrown 
its natural consequences as a heavy coun- 
terweight into the scale, and brought the 
glory of his life down into a deeper con- 
demnation. The facts are known and 
obvious, that disease and death have 
assumed in man's life forms of suffering, 
terror, and loathsomeness, unknown in 
the animal creation, which has neither 
risen like man to moral freedom, nor ex- 
perienced the retroactive consequences of 
a life false to nature and unworthy of 
itself. Mortality becomes most corrupt- 
ible among sinners. Death is a curse of 
no animal, except man. In this view of 
it, likewise, the Bible keeps close to the 
truth of nature, when it represents death 
as entering man's world in consequence 
of his sin. Moreover, in this respect also, 
the redemptive forces all tend to restore 
death to its natural state and period, as 
they enter and work through purifying re- 
actions in the life-blood of the Christian 



158 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

family; as they begin to accumulate new 
store of health, more abounding life, and 
power of quick, pulsing joy, in the veins 
and the blood, in the brain and the heart, 
of the children of light and the resurrec- 
tion. While sin and every fall of man 
works downward as a covenant and curse 
of death from one generation to another, 
so also spiritual birth into newness and 
light of life works upward from children 
to children's children as a covenant of 
mercy, giving back to nature her blessing 
when the Lord pronounced all things 
good, including in that good the natural 
end of all the organic life in the world 
before man was created. 

We hold, then, the Biblical teaching that 
death follows sin in a course of retribution, 
to be true to its acquired moral function, 
while it does not contravene, but rather 
attaches itself to its natural origin and 
utilities. The Biblical view is thus seen 
to present the truth, yet not the whole 
truth, concerning the law of death. It 
presents that part of the truth which is 
adapted to the ends of a moral revelation ; 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 159 

but not all of the truth which may be 
learned, and which, in consonance with 
the objects of revelation, it were better to 
leave man to learn for himself in the 
gradual prosecution of his studies of his 
nature and his environment. This con- 
ception of the limitation of the scope of 
revelation to moral ends, and the conse- 
quent incompleteness in many directions of 
the truth which it discloses, may not in- 
deed be satisfactory to the dogmatist who 
would find in his Bible a complete system 
of the divine counsels ; but it should sat- 
isfy all those inquirers and pupils of the 
Spirit, who have learned in the humility 
of their faith to say with that apostle to 
whom abundant revelations had been 
given: "For we know in part, and we 
prophesy in part ; but when that which is 
perfect is come, that which is in part shall 
be done away."* 

Before beginning a new chapter with 

the further problem, which we have as yet 

barely touched, concerning the utility of 

the suffering to which we are exposed by 

* 1 Cor. xiii. 9-10. 



160 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

our mortality, we may take a rapid look 
over the commanding position to which 
our discussion thus far has led us. We 
have seen that death first entered into the 
course of nature for the sake of life, and 
to help life up and on; we have found 
reason further to believe that life has at 
length reached in our spiritual being and 
energy such power and perfection that 
after its breaking loose from this body of 
the flesh, death will no more have any 
utility of life to subserve, and hence, with 
this bodily mortality, will pass away, — 
just as any process, function, or organ 
which ceases to be advantageous to life 
becomes atrophied and eventually disap- 
pears. Spiritual life at last shall succeed 
in rising above any further necessity of 
mortality. Or to put the same principle 
theistically, instead of biologically, the 
living God will no longer keep death in 
his employ in the home of the children of 
the resurrection, because He shall have no 
further good to do for their life through 
the service of death. We have found 
that this view is in moral harmony with 



THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 161 

the service of death which is emphasized 
in the Bible. The Scripture assures us 
that in the end mortality shall be swal- 
lowed up of life. Death itself shall thus 
be consumed for the nourishment of life's 
immortality. "Now he that wrought us 
for this very thing is God, who gave unto 
us the earnest of the Spirit." * 

Assuming, then, that an immortal kind 
of life has been attained in our spiritual 
nature, and its future possibilities, with 
its present earnest of the Spirit, — a life 
so aflame with love and winged with intel- 
ligence that death can never again over- 
take and quench it, — we find still before 
us a question of our mortality, into which 
our reasoning thus far has not entered, but 
with which we have the deepest concern. 
We are confronted by a further problem 
of our life's inevitableness, which often 
seems to rise before men, hard and for- 
bidding as the face of the precipice, upon 
which no sunlight lies. It is the problem 
of mortal suffering, and especially of the 
frequent overplus of suffering beyond any 
* 2 Cor. v. 5. 



162 THE TWO VIEWS OF DEATH 

seeming necessity, if nature's end be 
merely to bring life to a seasonable close. 
We shall proceed to show that from the 
nature-side of it some light — not, in- 
deed, as of the full day, but some gleam as 
of the morning — may be thrown upon the 
dark inevitableness of our mortality. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 
IN THE LAW OF DEATH 

IN approaching this more personal part 
of the problem of mortality, Ave shall 
seek first to apprehend the utilities of 
physical death for the immortality of the 
human race as a whole ; for if we succeed 
in grasping the nearer end of any great 
principle of life, our thought may swing 
itself up by it to higher and more fruitful 
conceptions of the truth.* Ignoring for 
the moment our personal desires of life, 
and man's many sorrows, it will prove of 
advantage if we may gain some clear, 
broad view of the utility for our hu- 
manity, as a whole, of the natural law of 
death. If we succeed occasionally in see- 
ing things as a whole (as a prophet once 

* The author has indicated the usefulness of this 
method of faith in his Personal Creeds, pp. 55 seq. 
163 



164 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

said), it will become less difficult for us to 
understand and to accept with cheerful- 
ness our personal place and part in an 
order of providence which in its largeness 
and completeness is seen to be benign. 

One of these first more evident utilities 
of death for human life as a whole consists 
in the immense enlargement, through its 
means, of this earth as a field for the birth 
and training of a race of immortals. 

In natural history one of the vital ques- 
tions concerns the field for life; whether 
it is large and rich, or sheltered enough 
to secure the maintenance and spread of 
vegetation, and to afford animal life ample 
opportunity for its increase. If the field 
is crowded or barren, or if it lies exposed 
to destructive elements, then among the 
plants and animals the struggle will be- 
come severe; and the possible amount of 
the variety, beauty, and joyousness of life 
in that too limited field will be reduced 
to narrow limits. Upon the same field of 
life the possibilities of existence are some- 
times restricted to a few kinds of flowers 
or trees. If a garden is left to run wild, 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 165 

several kinds of weeds may at first take 
possession of it; but these will be sup- 
planted by others, and in time not only 
the original flowers, but the earliest weeds, 
will have alike disappeared.* Many in- 
teresting illustrations have been described 
by Darwin, Wallace, and other observers, 
which show how the life of plants and 
animals is modified, limited, and deter- 
mined by the nature and the changeable 
elements of the field for the battle of life. 
There has occurred in some forests a silent 
conflict of the trees for possession of the 
soil, and after a long-continued struggle 
whole regiments of a single kind of trees 
have been driven from their native soil, 
while its nutritive wealth is taken posses- 
sion of by other species of trees. There 
has been, for instance, a succession 
among the forest trees of Denmark, 
and repeated invasions by one kind of 
trees against others which held possession 
of the land before it; in a field of life in- 
capable of maintaining them all together, 
the steps in the survival of the fittest have 
* Wallace, Darwinism, p. 15. 



166 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

been marked by the successive prevalence 
of the aspen, birch, fir, oak, and beech, 
the last conqueror of them all.* It is 
thus seen to be nature's method to limit 
some field of life in such ways as to 
compel a struggle for existence, and to 
secure surviving forms, which are best 
trained and fitted for the kind of life 
which the special field can most fruitfully 
cherish and preserve. Nature does not 
furnish one and the same field for all 
kinds of life, and in the same day of her 
grace. A field for life affording sufficient 
shelter and sustenance, and yet presenting 
just difficulties and exposure enough to 
keep life vigilant, active, and in the 
main successful, seems to be the desirable 
field, the most benevolent field, for nat- 
ure's ends of life. And nature could not 
keep any field clear and fertile for the pro- 
duction of the greatest possible abundance 
of the life best fitted to it, were it not for 
the swift succession of her organic forms 
and companies across it, — for the passing 
of the flowers, and for the falling one after 
* Wallace, Darwinism, p. 22. 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 167 

another of different orders of her trees ; or, 
in one word, were it not for the frequent 
aid of death in the service of her more 
abounding life. 

If, then, we regard ourselves for the 
moment as merely animals, no better than 
the beasts which perish; and if we con- 
sider also this earth as a limited field for 
human life; it is not difficult to see how 
this same law of physical succession, by 
the help of the regular interventions of 
death, may be nature's best possible 
method of securing always fresh, young, 
thrifty life, and in the greatest possible 
exuberance also and joy of it. Moreover, 
the hint thus derived from nature's 
method in the bestowal and increase of 
her gifts of physical life may carry our 
thought beyond this merely material wis- 
dom and beneficence. If we are become 
aware of ourselves as immortals, and if 
we reflect how narrow this little earth is 
as a field for the birth and the training of 
a race of immortals, we may likewise dis- 
cover a similar advantage in the succession 
of the generations of men on earth; and 



168 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

consequently the law of death, by means 
of which this overflowing abundance of 
life is obtained within a field so narrow, 
will wear a new aspect of benevolence. 
It is thus seen to be the Creator's chosen 
method of securing from a limited field 
the greatest possible number and variety 
of immortal beings ; it is the way of a 
divine wisdom in reaping the largest and 
richest conceivable harvest of an immortal 
society from this earthly and temporal field 
of life. 

This earth is a comparatively small 
field for the birth and nourishment of 
a great company of spirits, who are to 
have a universe for their occupancy, and 
eternity for their lifetime. If, then, no 
succession of generations could be secured 
by death; if all who are born here were to 
live and linger on until the last day ; this 
narrow, earthly field of immortal life 
would soon become choked, exhausted, 
incapable of sustaining further multipli- 
cation of the human race. Without the 
succession of generations, each having 
time enough here, and no more, for its 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 169 

birth and training for immortality ; with- 
out the succession of generations which 
death in the service of life's larger fruit- 
fulness maintains; the human race would 
yield on the whole a meagre harvest of 
life, — not the multitudinous host, the 
innumerable array of those whose names 
are written in heaven. Let us suppose, 
therefore, that God's good design is to 
use this little earth in such way as to 
produce for eternity the richest variety 
and happiest multitude conceivable of 
immortal souls, — or, in one word, to 
render earth's contribution of life to 
heaven the largest and best possible. In 
order to secure that end, so far as we can 
infer from the constitution and laws of 
nature below us, the Creator would have 
to introduce death, or the succession of 
generations through the intervention of 
death, in this earthly field of life. For 
there are only two ways thinkable by us 
for securing finally the fullest harvest of 
immortal life. For the graduation, so to 
speak, of many undying souls into real 
life, either there must be a large number 



170 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

of schoolrooms, or else there must be a 
constant succession of scholars through 
the same limited schoolrooms, and that 
succession must be as rapid as the pur- 
poses of a good Christian education for 
eternal life will allow. Or possibly, 
since creation is vast and God is infinite, 
the two methods might be combined, and 
there may be many schoolrooms for eter- 
nity in his universe as well as a ceaseless 
succession of scholars through them. It 
is conceivable that Jesus' word may have 
cosmic applications, and that at last all 
the systems of the constellations may 
send up their spiritual hosts to confirm 
the word of this earth's Lord, that there 
shall be many folds, but one flock. But 
however God may be working for eternity 
in other temporal worlds besides our own, 
— of that we have no knowledge, 10 — it is 
the fact that the method which He actu- 
ally has adopted of gathering the largest 
number of sheaves possible from this 
limited earthly field, is the method of 
brief seasons, and a swift succession of 
souls springing up to everlasting life; 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 171 

and for this- desirable end the reaper, 
death, must be kept ever busy in God's 
service. 

Besides this, another consideration, 
which has been mentioned in our review 
of the natural uses of death, comes to 
mind to help out our thought just at this 
point. The lifetime of each living organ- 
ism, whether animal or plant, as we have 
seen, seems to have been determined with 
reference to the preservation of its spe- 
cies, each organism existing as long as 
seems most advantageous for its species. 
So likewise the age of a man on this earth 
may be allotted to him under a similar 
law of utility, and the average duration 
of human life be determined by wise adap- 
tation to this end of producing on the 
whole the largest possible evolution of 
spiritual immortality from this mortality. 
Our personal affections and desires might 
compass at the widest not more than 
five generations. Our grandparents and 
parents, our brothers and sisters, our chil- 
dren and children's children, — these are 
the generations which our personal affec- 



172 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

tions and care might possibly embrace; 
and a warm heart indeed would be needed 
to light up with its one love so many 
generations even as these. Rarely are so 
many as five permitted by nature to co- 
exist on this narrow field of life. It is 
not a field large enough to permit of the 
profitable coexistence, the advantageous 
survival, of all its generations of men 
within the narrow limits of its opportu- 
nity for the birth, growth, and training of 
a race of immortals. We can conceive 
of many disadvantages, and of some checks 
and restraints put upon human progress, 
should so many as only five generations 
be permitted ordinarily to dwell under the 
same narrow roof together. It is better 
not so. Frequent interruptions of death 
render human progress possible from gen- 
eration to generation; death helps man 
make history. We find well secured in 
the successful processes of evolution a 
sufficient period of time for the continu- 
ance here of each human generation, but 
no longer lifetime than is needed; and 
this measured period seems to be in many 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 173 

conceivable ways best adapted for the 
moral and spiritual ends of the life of 
humanity considered as a whole. It is 
well fitted to maintain continuous pro- 
gress in the intellectual and moral life of 
man, to secure social stability with the pos- 
sibility of social improvement. It affords 
also to the individual life time enough 
for spiritual gestation in the womb of the 
natural, in order that at death it may come 
full-grown to the birth into the freedom 
of the spiritual ; while at the same time it 
renders this little passing earth among the 
stars most fertile in its total contribution to 
the final society of the kingdom of heaven. 
The disadvantages are obvious which 
would result from an entire absence of 
death, involving an uninterrupted con- 
tinuance of old age, even if we could sup- 
pose the overcrowding of the earth by all 
her generations to be possible. Were 
there no natural term of human life, the 
consequent struggle of an innumerable 
multitude of men to keep foothold on the 
earth might of itself bring in death as an 
artificial necessity, — an imposed and un- 



174 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

avoidable self-destruction of humanity. 
The extension to great length of the dura- 
tion of human life, if otherwise permis- 
sible, would probably involve more social 
loss than gain. No village could bring 
its fresh life to best endeavor and fullest 
fruition, if it were overshadowed and 
dominated by too many hoary Methuse- 
lahs. Habit might become too strong, or 
the social crust too thick, for life's fresh 
fruitfulness. An ingenious writer has 
remarked that one of the first necessities 
of civilization is to form a " cake of cus- 
tom "; * and the next necessity is to break 
it up. One of the laws of ascending life, 
which biologists regard as among the 
necessary vital conditions, is the law of 
plasticity. The matter of life must be 
plastic, or responsive to changed external 
conditions ; both stability of the germinal 
matter and some plasticity are indispen- 
sable to life's advance and enrichment. 
But too long a period for a human genera- 
tion might prevent this primal condition 
of progress. 

* Bagehot, Physics and Politics, p. 27. 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 175 

Mr. Martineau, with his facile pen, has 
depicted at length many of the disadvan- 
tages which may be conceived to attend a 
too extensive prolongation of the term of 
human life. He has vividly portrayed 
the evils which might result from the 
overgrowth of authority, and the blight 
which might fall upon progress from the 
too protracted shadow of the continued life 
even of the princes of science and the 
benefactors of mankind, as well as the 
shackles which would become fixed, and 
the despotisms which would be rendered 
invincible, by the longevity for half a 
millennium of a Domitian, a Philip II., 
or a Napoleon. "Precisely," he remarks, 
"at the juncture of two generations it is, 
that errors and prejudices drop out, and 
the dead resistance of habit to new enter- 
prises of thought and affection falls away. 
. . . Death then must not too long de- 
lay his discharge of these Emeriti, if the 
future is not to be clogged, instead of 
cleared, by the conquests of the Past." 
He adds also a suggestion, which falls 
into the line of our previous discussion, 



176 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

that for those who in the maturity of their 
powers are discharged from this life, the 
transition is a deliverance from the force 
of habits which have become fixed in the 
physical organism, the corporeal mechan- 
ism, to the detriment of the mind. 
"Death," he concludes, "may be but the 
provision for taking us abroad, ere we 
have stopped too long at home, and un- 
sealing the closed inlets of wisdom, affec- 
tion, and reverence, by the surprise of 
new light. In this aspect Death, instead 
of frustrating the ends of life, becomes 
the great arrester of ills, — the liberator 
of souls, for both the visible and the in- 
visible worlds." * 

"We have already observed that under 
the principle of natural selection the dura- 
tion of life for each species seems to have 
been shortened or lengthened, according 
to the needs of each for the most effective 
preservation of its life in its environment. 
If we should accept the earlier traditions 
of a prolonged lifetime for primeval man, 
we might infer that under the constant 
* Study of Religion, I., pp. 372-374. 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 177 

action of the same natural principle of 
selection, the duration of human life has 
been shortened ; that our lifetime of three- 
score years and ten has at length been 
secured as an adaptation on the whole 
best fitted to the ends of human life. 
We go a step farther, yet it is a step 
which immediately follows, when we 
reason that this natural law may furnish 
a point of advantage for a higher princi- 
ple of spiritual selection ; and that conse- 
quently the earthly life of man has been 
divided up into successive generations, 
and death permitted to prevail as the 
necessary means of making this division, 
which not only secures the largest spir- 
itual harvest, but which also affords to 
the individual the terms most suited to 
his attainment of the spiritual ends of 
human life. 11 

Hence we conclude that by means of the 
natural utilities of death life's spiritual 
field has been enlarged and enriched ; and 
that the result of this whole order of life 
and death shall be to make available to 
the largest number this earthly school of 



178 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

training for immortality, and in the end 
to introduce all the generations of men to 
one another in the most varied, most en- 
joyable, and glorified society which could 
by any means conceivable have been 
brought to the birth, developed, and fitted 
for exalted companionship on a field of 
life so limited as is this little earth. 
This also may prove to be the method 
which an unerring Wisdom has devised 
to render heaven itself an ever new and 
interesting companionship, by gathering 
together generations so differently born, 
and educated in times and seasons so vari- 
ous, that they shall have ever fresh attrac- 
tion and charm for one another in the one 
final society ; — by this vast variety of its 
preparation, the everlasting life itself may 
be prevented from lapsing into perpetual 
sameness and monotony. 

It now remains for us, in the light of 
these observations and reflections, to con- 
sider further the personal sufferings which 
our individual subjection to the law of 
death may render inevitable. Here, like- 
wise, in our thought of the sufferings of 



METPIOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 179 

our mortality, we are to keep firm grasp 
upon the strong vital principle that death 
is sent, and works always in the end, for 
the advantage of life. Hence we must 
believe that the sufferings attendant upon 
the entrance of death into the circle of our 
friendships, as well as the pains of death 
through which at any hour one may be 
called personally to pass, are sent, not to 
hurt us, or to make our human affections 
our most cruel tormentors, but for some 
further good purpose and ulterior benefit 
of life. We begin with the discovery of 
a law of natural utility in death. We 
rise to the conception of a higher law of 
spiritual selection and use, under which, 
through the suffering of death, life may 
be adapted to higher ends, and carried on 
to nobler uses. We observe, moreover, 
that an effect or working of nature which 
may seem to be disadvantageous when 
viewed in relation to one order of life, 
may be seen to be advantageous when 
judged in its relation to some higher 
order of life. "Degeneracy of parts, or 
of types of life, has been necessary to the 



180 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

advance of other and better organs or 
forms. " * The end of one kind of existence 
may be the birth of a new species. A 
method which works apparently waste- 
fully in one sphere may be the beneficence 
of nature in which a superior kind of life 
is trained and perfected. Suffering in 
the lower kind may become gain in the 
higher ; the death of the one may be the 
victory of the other. Thus the natural 
law of struggle for existence becomes a 
school of altruism in man's development. 
We cannot affirm therefore of any suffer- 
ings which men may have to endure in 
this lower existence, that they are need- 
less or wasteful; we should know first 
their values in terms of the farther and 
future life. 

When the sufferings and pains to which 
man is subjected through the reign of 
death are thus brought under this concep- 
tion of its utility, — physical, moral, and 
spiritual, — the present mystery of suffer- 
ing is put in the way at least of its ex- 

* Cope, Primary Factors of Organic Evolution, 
p. 75. 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 181 

planation, although now we are far from 
able to follow this way of its justification 
through all darkness into the full and 
perfect light. But when once fairly ap- 
prehended from this principle of use for 
life, although now seen but darkly, pain 
and sorrow are lifted up, and put in the 
course of a moral justification: as en- 
trusted with a vital mission, they await 
the final explanation in which all God's 
ways shall be seen to be the paths of life. 
For what is the real test of benevolence ? 
What is the final, the supreme test of 
beneficence? Is it not always the vital 
test, — the decisive test of service for life ? 
This is the one constant test, which we 
have found applied in nature throughout 
her whole course from the lowest micro- 
scopic cell up to the living soul of man. 
The critical test has always been the vital 
test; it is not the question which we are 
daily asking, How shall any experience 
affect our feeling? It is the question 
which God from eternity to eternity pro- 
poses, What shall it contribute to the life ? 
"Is not the life more than the food, and 



182 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

the body than the raiment ? " The diviner 
interest in us does not concern primarily 
the effect which the coming of any ser- 
vant of God, whether with message of life 
or death, may have upon our sensibility; 
it is centred rather in the gift which may 
be brought to our life. The holier, God- 
like interest in us would seem to be this : 
What shall His working achieve for our 
power of living ? What shall it accomplish 
for the enlargement of our capacity of 
mind and heart? What shall it finally 
secure for our abundant entrance into the 
full life of love, and its blessedness over 
all forever? God's eye is fixed upon 
character; He regards its capacity for 
heaven. This, and this only, is vital test 
high and holy enough by which to judge 
God's way with a soul, and by which at 
last his way shall be made plain from 
lowest depths of his beginnings to highest 
heights of his redemptions. 

Even in this present time, dark and 
lonely as its shadows often are, we may 
follow much human suffering, and our 
own grief, along this sure path, trodden 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 183 

before us by the servants of divine Wis- 
dom, which even in its descent leads along 
the firm purpose of the Love that is reign- 
ing and waiting upon the celestial height. 
Already in niairy instances we may see 
signs and discern partial fulfilments of a 
large and beneficent utility in the minis- 
try of sorrow; the vital test begins, at 
least, to render the way of suffering intel- 
ligible as a way of God's commandment 
in which hearts are enlarged. When seen 
in the chastening light of this diviner 
beneficence, the family-life will often take 
on new worth and fairer color and beauty. 
For the beginning, the growth, the se- 
curity, and the perfecting of the family- 
life, which He has created, God has sent 
his two ministering spirits of life and 
death, each appointed to serve love; the 
one to call forth the family-life, and to 
give it strength, identity, and firmness; 
while, in due time, the other silently fol- 
lows to sanctify it, to impart to it a spir- 
itual purity, and to render it altogether 
worthy and sure of its immortality. Both 
these angels, by God's appointment from 



184 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

the beginning, serve love; and together, 
working in one ministry from God, and 
towards one end of love, they shall bring 
the family-life from this earthliness to its 
celestial completion. 

Our thought at this point of spiritual 
outlook may gain distinctness by the aid 
of an analogy from the simplest process 
of natural life. It is an analogy to be 
drawn indeed from an operation of nature 
which lies far distant from our personal 
life and affections ; far distant, that is, in 
time and in the successions of the crea- 
tion's order, but not distant in the principle 
of intelligence which it illustrates ; for all 
God's ways, whether far or near, are one 
way of intelligence, and lead towards the 
same ends of reason from all quarters of 
the created universe. Nature is one do- 
main of sufficient reason. We may bring, 
therefore, this parable from the lowest 
for the highest life. Near the beginnings 
of organic existence, as we have found, 
the service of death helped life press on 
from unicellular to multicellular organ- 
isms. Life, by the timely aid of death, 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 185 

passed beyond the stage of isolation in 
the single cell; and for its further pres- 
ervation and advantage proceeded to form 
clusters and colonies of cells, by their as- 
sociation and mutual serviceableness grow- 
ing into one organism of many parts, and 
becoming thus more sentient, and more 
largely responsive. The lower working 
adumbrates the higher felicity. As in 
the beginning, so much more in the end- 
ing, life, having been helped to realize 
its spiritual ends by death, shall become 
complete and rich in definite groupings 
of souls, in choice societies of spirits who 
shall be mutually serviceable as members 
of one body, having been "made perfect 
in one," — as the last and heavenly aspi- 
ration of life has been uttered for us all 
in the Lord's prayer for the life eternal. 

We can the more readily believe in 
the final perfection of the family-life, 
which lies beyond the veil, because we 
can sometimes see, from those parts of 
its one circle of love which lie still 
within our knowledge, how death, which 
seems to break it, may work beneficently 



Lbb METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

for its hallowing and perfecting. As 
no other servant of the living One, 
ofttimes death will redeem from selfish- 
ness, consecrate, and glorify the family- 
life and the family-love. Death at times 
seems to raise it to holier and even more 
blessed consciousness of itself. It will 
bring back one or another of the house- 
hold from lives too separate and too self- 
seeking. In some instances death has 
seemed to call forth for the first time the 
full power of love, revealing it to itself, 
and giving it deeper knowledge of its own 
abiding worth; the true, full family-love 
in such instances must needs come to its 
immortal birth in pain and travail of soul. 
There are families united as never before, 
and united forever, around some dear, 
sacred grave. And always, among pure 
and trusting souls, the presence of sor- 
row may soften and render more tender, 
while it deepens and makes more sure of 
itself, the heart of an immortal love. So 
the living One by a twofold working of 
his grace shall bring to perfection the 
family-life; He sends his angel of life to 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 187 

create it, and to fashion its earthly form, 
fair and full of promise; and He sends 
erelong his other ministering angel to 
give the family-life part and possession 
in both worlds, the seen and the unseen; 
so that even here and now it may enter 
by faith, as well as by sight, into that 
knowledge of love which is sure, sacred, 
eternal, as is the blessedness of God. 

In this connection there should not be 
forgotten a use of human suffering, which 
is very dimly foreshadowed in the lower 
processes of nature, but which can only 
come to its appointed service in the moral 
life; namely, the vicarious use of suf- 
fering, and of suffering even unto death. 
Hints, indeed, and dim adumbrations of 
a vicarious principle seem to be indicated 
in the method which nature among lowly 
organisms sometimes employs of the sub- 
stitution of one part for another in the 
discharge of the functions of life; or of 
the dissolution even of some cells in order 
that an entire organ may be preserved. 
We have already noticed (p. 39) that 
there are specific functions in the higher 



188 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

organisms which involve the death of the 
cells which discharge those functions, as, 
for instance, in the secretory glands ; or as 
the exercise of their function by the blood- 
corpuscles involves their dissolution.* 

This sacrificial method of life is fore- 
shadowed likewise from the earliest be- 
ginnings in the giving up of maternal life 
among the lowliest multicellular organ- 
isms for the sake of reproduction. The 
female of some Mesozoa, for instance 
(which seem to be an intermediate class 
between the single-celled organisms, and 
those having a body of several cells), 
forms within herself numerous germ- 
cells, and then, to set them free, "ter- 
minates her own life by bursting." Nat- 
ure thus sacrifices the one form for the 
many. Another familiar instance is the 
love-dance, as it is poetically described, 
of the May-flies, and the death of both 
parents soon after the fertilized eggs 
have been deposited on the surface of 
the water, in order that new, teeming 
insect life may again take wing in the 

* Weismann, Essays upon Heredity, I., p. 62. 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 189 

sunshine. Nature, indeed, among her 
higher animal forms has greatly reduced 
the costliness of birth, and changed her 
earlier sacrificial method of reproduction 
into the better way of keeping the mother 
among the living for the sake of the 
child; — the tragic sacrifice of a life for 
a life becomes the exception, and is not 
the rule, since nature brought to human 
perfectness her "evolution of a mother." 

Such acts, however, and all similar in- 
stances of substitution or sacrifice of a part 
for the whole in the discharge of the func- 
tions of animal life, serve at best as the 
rudimentary suggestions of a high and 
fruitful principle of vicariousness, which 
can find scope and power for its full benefi- 
cence only in the sphere of freedom, and 
among the possibilities of love like that 
which the Father hath for the Son. Hence 
death may be utilized as the means already 
furnished and finished by nature for the 
manifestation of this higher spiritual prin- 
ciple of vicariousness. Through the suf- 
ferings which death, having entered into 
nature, renders possible, love within the 



190 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

family circle, as well as love in its divine 
comprehension of the world, may find the 
opportunity for its cross, and through the 
suffering of the one the many may be made 
perfect. With a profounder insight into 
the law of vicariousness (which is one of 
the great laws of life) than in our careless 
reading we may have observed, an apostle 
once wrote of his rejoicing in his suffer- 
ings for the sake of others; and without 
hesitancy he put his afflictions for them 
into the same order as the sacrifice of the 
death of the Christ, when he wrote : " Now 
I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, 
and fill up on my part that which is lack- 
ing of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh 
for his body's sake, which is the church." * 
The overplus of suffering, the kind and 
amount of sufferings which seem to be 
beyond any natural necessity for the mere 
bringing a life to an end, and also to be 
out of all apparent relations to the desert 
of the person who endures it, may fall 
more often and more largely than we may 
be aware under this same principle of 
* Col. i. 24. 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 191 

vicariousness, to which the Christ freely 
subjected himself even unto the death of 
the cross. The effect of such suffering, 
which remains in the softening of sympa- 
thy and the enlargement of heart of some 
witnesses of it, may have vicarious worth 
long after the man or the woman, who 
was anointed to be an example of such 
patience, may have outlived and forgotten 
all pain in the happy freedom of the other 
world. In this vicariousness for the home, 
for a whole circle of friends, for country, 
or for mankind, the sufferings of the right- 
eous, or the flames of the martyrs, can 
never be regarded as needless. The ex- 
cess of suffering which sometimes we 
must witness by the bedsides of persons 
whose goodness we think should have 
rendered them most favored of heaven in 
their exit from this world, may have in it 
more Christ-like resemblance and virtue 
than we have discerned, serving, as it 
does, in the utilities of God's grace a 
double purpose, not only making perfect 
the son of God's love, who must endure 
it, but also having vicarious grace for 



192 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

our hearts, who behold it, — even as the 
Master's cross was for the disciples' sake. 
We have come from some sick-beds as 
from a sacrament, having received earnest 
of the Spirit. 

The conclusion of this study of the 
natural utility of death in the light of 
science will have been reached, if we gain 
thereby some firmer, surer standing on 
the truth which the poet has won sim- 
ply by following the sure instinct of his 
interpretative spirit : — 

"Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, 
The truth to flesh and sense unknown, 
That Life is ever lord of Death, 
And Love can never lose its own ! " 

We may now think that this truth of 
the poet's vision is not utterly unknown 
to flesh and sense, for our biology itself, 
unveiling the secret of the living cell, 
and revealing the continuous power and 
wondrous ascent of evolution from the 
least particles of organic structure up to 
the heart of man, is teaching us that " Life 
is ever lord of Death"; and if this first 
line of nature's revelation proves true, 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 193 

the last line of the poet's spiritual creed 
would seem to follow in natural rhythm 
with it, that "Love can never lose its 
own." Not only, then, through a poet's 
listening to the heart of life, but by pur- 
suing with scientific reasoning the ways 
of nature up to the living soul, we may 
gain assurance that by the whole appoint- 
ment of suffering and death the God of 
love means not to break human hearts, 
but to make them; not to destroy, but to 
fulfil nature's one law of life. 

This profounder view of suffering as 
the means of making hearts with diviner 
capacity for love and heaven goes far 
deeper than the received view of future 
compensation for present pains. It will 
bring a stronger comfort than the common 
idea that for every cross there shall be a 
crown hereafter. The truth is that our 
crosses become our crowns. It was not 
a cross of wood exchanged for a crown of 
gold. It was the one divine life hasten- 
ing on through the crucifixion to its glory 
with the Father. It is not for any dis- 



194 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

ciple a trial cast aside, and a joy received 
instead ; it is a sorrow transmuted into a 
joy, a trial changed into a glory. With- 
out the one, the other could not be, — at 
least not so supremely and so perfectly. 

The insufficiency of the merely compen- 
satory view of the future life either as a 
reward of our present suffering, or as a 
justification of God's ways in our tem- 
poral discipline and death, will appear the 
moment we turn upon it the light which 
may have been gained from all our pre- 
vious discussion. For from the reason- 
ing which discovers a divine principle of 
utility in the service of death to life, 
this word compensation will seem too 
low and narrow fittingly to represent the 
aim and march of the divine benevolence 
through the whole process and period of 
life, and death, and life again still fuller 
and richer. Compensation is a word too 
quantitative and mechanical worthily to 
represent the indwelling and formative 
Spirit of life throughout its whole process 
of evolution. It is an unworthy concep- 
tion of our loss or gain; as though the 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 195 

Almighty God could employ the resources 
of measureless love in meting out compen- 
sations, measure for measure, for our 
human losses, with one hand filling life's 
cup, while emptying it with the other; 
and by and bye, filling it again, or pos- 
sibly now in this world half-filling it again 
with joy. But that were not Godlike ; it 
is not like the vital method of God in 
nature. For the divine process of life 
and death throughout nature goes straight 
on, and always towards more and richer 
life, even though it must go straight 
through death in order to reach larger life 
and happier. The divine method of life 
has in it the patience of the ages, and the 
Ion gsuffe ring of grace; but it goes 
straight on, and cannot miss its deter- 
mined end. Apparent retrogressions in 
nature are steps in a further progression ; 
the descent is but the way to the ascent 
beyond; the disintegration is for the bet- 
ter integration ; the inorganic breaks down 
that the organic may be built up; as the 
organic likewise is dissolved that new 
births may appear. The conception of 



196 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLEjSTCE 

evolution as one vast cyclic movement, 
which in some far-distant age shall return 
into itself, beginning in chaos and des- 
tined to end in universal dissolution, is 
not true to the facts which lie within the 
compass of our knowledge ; the arc of its 
course, which we can measure, is but as a 
span, yet it is enough to determine the line 
of its direction, and to indicate that God's 
curve of creation has measureless scope, 
and is not a circle returning into itself. 
One order of nature succeeds another in 
definite ascent, and the promise of the 
natural opens into the spiritual. There 
is also in present spiritual beginnings a 
prophecy of better things which God hath 
prepared beyond the power of the heart to 
conceive; the spiritual shows no sign, 
it gives no evidence, of its falling back 
again into the natural, from which it has 
already risen and shall spring up clear 
and free. The doves let out through the 
soul's windows do not come back to the 
ark. 

We greatly err if we mistake momen- 
tary retrogressions for a faltering pur- 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 197 

pose of life in the heart of nature. The 
apparent cyclic movements of life are but 
the rising and the reflux of the wave ; the 
stream flows on. The divine law of life 
is not mere process of emptying and fill- 
ing, of a perpetual ebb and flow; it is a 
positive law of God's fulfilling himself in 
many ways. Evolution is ascent and ever 
more expectant march of life through this 
mortality toward immortality. From the 
first to the last known development of life, 
the process has been a procedure of posi- 
tive and progressive determination; it is 
not a series of measured compensations, a 
mere balancing of loss and gain ; it is de- 
velopment along definite and predeter- 
mined lines.* There has been a steady 
and sure advance of the immanent reason 
of nature through her successive forms: 
do we not read, " In the beginning was the 
Word, and the Word was with God. . . . 
And the Word became flesh." Evolu- 



* This is not saying that the later organic struct- 
ure is preformed in the earlier ; hut, whatever the 
chromatin of the nucleus may contain, something 
there does determine the future organism. 



198 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

tion has been a progressive revelation of 
the Word. " Of the increase of his govern- 
ment, " it was said by a prophet of old, 
"there shall be no end." The history of 
life has been the movement of a Messianic 
prophecy, and of the increase of the king- 
dom of the Word of life there has been no 
end. " My Father worketh hitherto, and 
I work," said the Christ; and the work of 
the Father and the Son has been and is 
something positively grander, something 
more continuously and wondrously benefi- 
cent and beautiful, than in our common 
and too beggarly hopes of heavenly gain 
we are wont to conceive. For it is more 
than bringing balm to the wounded, or 
rest for the weary; it is the strong, 
straightforward work of God from the 
beginning of bringing life clear through 
to its last, full, self-conscious perfection 
and immortal love. It is, and shall be, 
the one divine work, alone worthy of 
God, who takes life first from his own 
self-existence, and plants the divine seed 
of it in the darkness at the root of the 
worlds ; who protects, shelters, hides, and 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 199 

develops it in this earthiness; and who 
in his time and season lifts it above the 
sod into its spiritual blossoming in his 
light. The last consummate fruit of this 
vital method and goodness of the Creator 
is not the first Adam, who dies, but the 
second man, who is of heaven. "How- 
beit," in this order of beneficent evolution, 
" that was not first which is spiritual, but 
that which is natural ; and afterward that 
which is spiritual." Life sown first in 
corruption is raised in incorruption. 
" And as we have borne the image of the 
earthy, we shall also bear the image of the 
heavenly." In this present time we who 
belong both to the natural, which is dying, 
and to the spiritual, which is living, "re- 
ceive the earnest of the Spirit"; at the 
sure and luminous centre of our self-con- 
scious being and love, we receive the ear- 
nest of the Spirit, witnessing to the spirit 
which is within man; and, having re- 
ceived "the spirit of adoption, whereby we 
cry, Abba, Father," we know ourselves 
also as children of the resurrection. Al- 
ready in our inward renewal of faith and 



200 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

hope, death is swallowed up of life ; holy 
baptisms of the eternal love fall upon our 
closest, dearest friendships in the descent, 
like the heavenly dove, of a sacred sorrow; 
and death, so often returning, imparts to 
our life in the home, and in the commun- 
ion of the church, deeper and more inti- 
mate knowledge of love, and its prayer of 
faith for immortality. Our human hearts, 
startled at first it may be by the touch of 
God's silent servant of death, awake more 
clearly and surely to an expectation of life 
which shall be alike worthy of our power 
of loving, and worthy of God's power 
to finish the work which He has begun in 
our human hearts and their happiest com- 
panionships. For, as the Scripture puts it, 
as though with a fine scorn of the faithless- 
ness which could imagine the Lord of life 
to be frustrated in his work, God " wrought 
us for this very thing," that " what is mor- 
tal may be swallowed up of life." We, 
looking backwards and beneath us, look- 
ing upwards and above, being ourselves of 
the same flesh and having the Spirit of 
him in whom life attained its highest 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 201 

human form, in whom "the Life was 
manifested," and of whom also they who 
had seen the glory of his life declared that 
it was not "possible" for God's holy one 
that his soul should be holden of death, 

— we, likewise, should know that all 
things are ours, whether our earthly 
friends and comrades of the years gone 
b}', "whether Paul, or Apollos, or Ce- 
phas," — whatever their names may be, 

— whether "the world, or life, or death, 
or things present, or things to come ; " 
all are ours: for we "are Christ's, and 
Christ is God's": "For God is not the 
God of the dead, but of the living."* 

We turn in conclusion to Him in whom 
the life was manifested, for the last word 
concerning the service and use of death 
in God's method and purpose of life's sur- 
vival and perfecting. "It is expedient 
for you," said the Christ, "that I go 
away." Our Lord recognized thus a defi- 
nite usefulness for his disciples in his 
final departure from their world of sight 
* 1 Cor. iii. 22-23; Matt. xxii. 32. 



202 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

and sense. The Scriptures justify us in 
thinking of our Lord as representing man 
in the full idea of his nature, and in all 
the possibilities of his being. The life 
which he lived on the earth, and which 
was exalted in his ascension, is our life: 
" It behooved him in all things to be made 
like unto his brethren." * If Jesus, there- 
fore, could perceive a certain and definite 
expediency in his leaving this world, we 
must recognize in his departure from his 
disciples an instance and illustration of 
the same general law of moral utility, 
under which for his disciples in their 
times, as for the Master in his hour, it shall 
be expedient for them to go hence. If it 
were necessary for the Lord to depart that 
he might continue his ministry for his 
disciples elsewhere, going to prepare a 
place for them; if he could become more 
to his friends henceforth by his ascension 
than he could have been by walking longer 
as the Son of man before them; so, like- 
wise, shall the same divine expediency 
overtake, and enfold in its beneficent pur- 
* Heb. ii. 17. 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 203 

pose, each of the disciples in his time; 
there shall come a day when it shall be 
useful also for each one of us, his disci- 
ples, as it was expedient for the Master, 
to go hence and be seen here no more, 
although the Father only may know the 
seasons best for his sons. The God of the 
living shall take us also up into the same 
larger and higher expediency of death, 
from which the Son of his love was not 
made exempt. He once said, "It is ex- 
pedient"; and thereby before all human 
sorrow, and in the midst of our human 
incompleteness, he declared the superior 
law and larger wisdom of the Father's 
beneficence in every necessity of death. 
There is one law, and one Spirit, and one 
love. Death ever serves, and never really 
rules. It only seems to reign for a little 
while. It shall be no more, when its full 
measure of service for life — the true life, 
the life eternal — shall have been ren- 
dered. Already it is overcome in the self- 
conscious immortality of love. Among 
the disciples of the Lord, in the commun- 
ion of his Spirit, death can henceforth 



204 METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 

enter only as something expedient, often 
far more spiritually expedient than we 
may now know, — as was the Lord's ab- 
sence for a little while from his chosen 
friends. He that believeth "hath eternal 
life " ; and forgetting the pains, the suf- 
ferings, the sorrows, which are in their 
nature temporal, he may possess within 
himself the love, the life, the dear friend- 
ships and the joys of companionship, 
which are eternal. In memory and in 
hope, faith has the eternal, and is passed 
from death unto life. The last prayer of 
the Lord of life is that we may be made 
perfect in one. His promise fulfils the 
law and the gospel of life from the begin- 
ning. Life has, and can have, no other 
end and destiny, for it can have no other 
fulfilment. Personal fellowship, made 
perfect in love, is Life's only conceivable 
consummation. Anything less divine 
were no completion. The Scriptures of 
Life — all its prophets and psalms — are 
a holy word of nature, which cannot pass 
away until all shall be fulfilled. The 
fulfilment of all is in the risen and as- 



METHOD OF POSITIVE BENEVOLENCE 205 

cended Life with the Father. From this 
divine fellowship is declared to us also 
the sure word of immortality: "Because 
I live, ye shall live also." "Whether we 
live, we live unto the Lord: or whether 
we die, we die unto the Lord: whether 
we live therefore, or die, we are the 
Lord's." "Whether we wake or sleep, 
we should live together with him." 

Life, therefore, to the children of the 
Highest, can have no broken lines. Meas- 
ured in time's brief sections, it may seem 
incomplete; drawn on larger scale, all 
life's ways are seen to meet; in God's own 
plan and creation of it, our life can have 
no brokenness. Eternity frames a finished 
picture. There is nothing really sad, for 
there is no eternal sorrow in the heart of 
God. In His blessedness over all forever, 
our life shall keep its perfect troth, and 
have its completed love. 



APPENDIX 



NOTE I, p. 19 

Weismann's view may be stated in his own words 
in the following abstract of it which he gave at the 
close of his essay on Life and Death : — 

" I. Natural death occurs only among multicellu- 
lar beings; it is not found among unicellular or- 
ganisms. The process of encystment in the latter 
is in no way comparable with death. 

"II. Natural death first appears among the 
lowest Heteroplastid Metazoa, in the limitation 
of all the cells collectively to one generation, and 
of the somatic or body-cells proper to a restricted 
period : the somatic cells afterwards in the higher 
Metazoa came to last several and even many gen- 
erations, and life was lengthened to a corresponding 
degree. 

"III. This limitation went hand in hand with 
a differentiation of the cells of the organism into 
reproductive and somatic cells, in accordance with 
the principle of division of labor. This differ- 
entiation took place by the operation of natural 
selection. 

"IV. The fundamental biogenetic law applies 
only to multicellular beings ; it does not apply to 

207 



208 APPENDIX 

unicellular forms of life. This depends, on the one 
hand, upon the mode of reproduction by fission 
which obtains among the Monoplastides (unicellular 
organisms), and on the other, upon the necessity, 
induced by sexual reproduction, for the mainte- 
nance of a unicellular stage in the development of 
the Polyplastides (multicellular organisms). 

" V. Death itself, and the longer or shorter dura- 
tion of life, both depend entirely on adaptation. 
Death is not an essential attribute of living matter ; 
it is neither necessarily associated with reproduc- 
tion, nor a necessary consequence of it." (Essays 
upon Heredity, vol. i. pp. 160-161.) 

The similar view of Biitschli, to which reference 
was made above, may be given in this extract: 
" When we observe the history of the continual pro- 
duction of certain Protozoa, ... we meet the most 
singular fact that in the life of these organisms 
death, in the sense of the annihilation of organized 
matter, and from causes which are inherent in the 
organism, does not properly occur." He regarded 
the cause of death in the organisms to be the failure 
of a " certain fermentative element," which is nec- 
essary in order that the chemical transformation 
may renew itself. In the Protozoa this necessary 
element is renewed by conjugation and division. 
He located this element of continuous life in the 
nucleus. " The gradually sinking life-energy of 
the Infusoria is again reinforced through conjuga- 
tion." (Zoologischer Anzeiger, 5. 1882, pp. 65-66.) 

M. ISTussbaum, also, advanced somewhat similar 
observations with regard to the continuance of life 
among the Protozoa. (Arch, fiir Mik. Anat, 41, 



APPENDIX 209 

p. 119.) Weismann, however, took these sugges- 
tions up into a working-theory of heredity. 

NOTE II, p. 19 

Maupas published the results of his investiga- 
tions in a series of notes in the Comptes Rendus in 
the years 1886-88. He also published a long mono- 
graph upon the Multiplication of Ciliated Infusoria 
in the Archives de Zoologie, 2d Series, Vol. 6, pp. 
165 sq. In this article he gives a complete account 
of his prolonged investigations, sums up the facts 
observed, and shows that Weismann's supposition 
that death occurs first among the Metazoa is re- 
moved by the results of his investigations. 

NOTE in, p. 23 

In a reply to criticisms, which was published in 
Nature (Feb., 1890, Vol. 41, pp. 317-323), Weis- 
mann maintains his original positions with regard 
to the potential immortality of the Protozoa, while 
he defines some of his views more clearly. He 
holds that the first differentiation of cells pro- 
duced two sets of cells, — the somatic, consisting 
of the mortal cells of the body proper, and the 
germinal cells, which are immortal. He defines 
this immortality as one not of the organic sub- 
stance, but of " a definite form of activity." He con- 
ceives the protoplasm of the unicellular organisms 
to be such that the cycle of life returns to the same 
starting-point, like the circulation of water in the 
inorganic world. " As in the physical and chemical 
properties of water there is no inherent cause for 



210 APPENDIX 

the cessation of this cycle, so there is no clear rea- 
son in the physical condition of unicellular organ- 
isms why the cycle of life, i.e. of division, growth 
by assimilation, and repeated division, should ever 
end; and this characteristic it is which I have 
termed immortality." He considers that it is pos- 
sible under some circumstances, and to some extent, 
for the protoplasm to be so modified that "the 
metabolic activity no longer exactly follows its own 
orbit, but after more or fewer revolutions comes to 
a standstill, and results in death." All living mat- 
ter is variable; why should not variations in the 
protoplasm have also occurred which, while they 
fulfilled certain functions of the individual economy 
better, caused a metabolism which did not exactly 
repeat itself, i.e. sooner or later came to a condition 
of rest ? " Immortality, in the scientific sense in- 
tended, he defines as " a cyclical acting of organic 
material devoid of any intrinsic momentum which 
would lead to its cessation"; and he says, "I main- 
tain, therefore, in its entirety my original statement 
that monoplastids and the germ-cells of higher 
forms have no natural death." Of Maupas' ex- 
periments and criticisms, Weismann has this to 
say: "Even were his observations correct, they 
would still fall short of proving his conclusions; 
they would prove nothing against the immortality 
of the Protozoa, or for a rejuvenescence in the sense 
here intended; they would rather state the plati- 
tude that ovum and spermatozoon must die, if the 
condition of their continued existence, namely, 
fusion, inevitable in most species of plants and 
animals, be prohibited; but this is an accidental, 



APPENDIX 211 

not a natural death. Richard Hertwig ( Ueber die 
Conjugation der Infusorien, Munchen, 1889) has 
also briefly shown that the facts, on which Maupas 
bases his inferences, are not universally true ; that 
Infusoria, hindered from conjugation, do not die, 
but increase by division, and may produce whole 
colonies of animals, nay, that they are generally 
rendered thus abnormally prolific." 

By rej Livenescence, in the sense intended above, 
Weismann means the theory which supposes that 
conjugation is necessary to the continuance of re- 
production, — a rejuvenescence without which the 
reproductive power itself would fail. To this view 
he opposes his theory, which may be stated in his 
own summary of it as follows: "The first result 
and meaning of conjugation may be provisionally 
expressed in the following formula: Conjugation 
originally signified a strengthening of the organism 
in relation to reproduction, which happened when, 
from some external cause, such as want of oxygen, 
warmth, or food, the growth of the individual to 
the extent necessary for reproduction could not 
take place." ... " According to my theory, con- 
jugation at first only occurred under unfavorable 
conditions, and assisted the species to overcome such 
difficulties." (Essays upon Heredity, vol. i. p. 294.) 

In an elaborate essay upon Amphimixis or the 
Essential Meaning of Conjugation and Sexual Re- 
production, which was published in 1891 (Essays 
upon Heredity, vol. ii. p. 98), Weismann again 
maintains vigorously his original position as to the 
immortality of the Protozoa against Maupas' criti- 
cisms. He regards the death of the unconjugated 



212 APPENDIX 

Infusoria as abnormal. Natural, or physiological 
death of an organism occurs when its destruction 
"is dependent on some adaptation especially di- 
rected to this end " (p. 205). Such adaptation for 
the destruction of the body-cells is found first 
among the Metazoa. Weismann ridicules the idea 
that there is any natural necessity for death as an 
idea which has " its origin in the old mystic con- 
ception of life." He regards " the power of living 
on indefinitely when the vital processes have once 
begun, as the fundamental peculiarity of living 
matter" (p. 209). 

NOTE IV, p. 24 

Mr. Darwin regarded sexual selection as a true 
cause in nature, co-working with natural selection ; 
but he did not throw any light upon the question 
of the origin and function of sexuality itself. This 
question has more recently become a prominent 
one in the biological world. Mr. Wallace came to 
conclusions differing from Mr. Darwin concerning 
the effect of sexual selection in the coloration of 
animals ; but in one respect he goes beyond Dar- 
win, when he holds that, " Diversity of sex becomes, 
therefore, of primary importance as the cause of 
variation." {Darwinism, p. 439.) Weismann has 
gone far beyond the earlier Darwinism in his 
strenuous insistence upon the prime importance of 
sexuality in evolution. He has expressed his final 
conclusion in the following words : " I am con- 
vinced that the two forms of amphimixis — namely, 
the conjugation of unicellular, and the sexual repro- 



APPENDIX 213 

duction of multicellular organisms — are means of 
producing variation. The process furnishes an in- 
exhaustible supply of fresh combinations of indi- 
vidual variations which are indispensable to the 
process of selection." {The Germ-Plasm, p. 413.) 

Weismann's views have been vigorously combated 
by an American biologist, the late Professor J. A. 
Ryder, in an article printed in the Proceedings of the 
American Philosophical Society, 1890 (pp. 109 sq.), 
and also in a lecture which was published in the 
Wood's Holl Biological Lectures for the year 1894. 
Professor Ryder holds that " sexuality has arisen 
very gradually, and only through an extensive 
series of very gentle progressive, and successive 
steps." He believes that it not only includes 
variability, but also provides "greatly increased 
chances for the survival of the thus protected 
germs, or viviparously produced young." But in 
utter rejection of Weismann's theories of the deter- 
mination of life from the germ, Professor Ryder 
sought to bring all the phenomena of heredity 
under a purely physical, dynamical conception. 
He found in nutrition the impelling force for the 
differentiation of sex, and this, as well as all other 
differentiations, he would work out mathematically 
as a problem of the continuation of energy under 
given mechanical conditions. Sexuality, he be- 
lieves, is the effect of continuous growth caused by 
cumulative integrations. The "setting-aside the 
germ-plasm " is no " device " for any ulterior pur- 
pose. He affirms, however, that " sexuality has 
arisen, in the main, under conditions determined 
by natural selection " ; and he even says of it that 



214 APPENDIX 

"sexuality is altruistic in nature." (Biol. Lect- 
ures, Wood's Holl, 1894, p. 35.) Professor Ryder 
objects to Weismann's theory that "its extreme 
elaboration is its greatest weakness " ; the opposite 
objection would lie against his dynamical hypothe- 
sis of inheritance ; its extreme simplicity is its 
greatest weakness. The manifold diversity of facts 
and processes in the development of life refuses to 
be reduced to a single physical equation. 

A more cautious view of the problem of the 
origin of sex is that expressed by Professor Wilson 
in his recent volume on " The Cell in Development 
and Inheritance.'" He says : "According to the older 
and more familiar dynamic hypothesis . . . the 
essential end of sexuality is rejuvenescence, i.e. the 
restoration of the growth energy and the inaugura- 
tion of a new cycle of cell-division. . . . That con- 
jugation or fertilization actually has such a dynamic 
effect is disputed by no one. What is not deter- 
mined is whether this is the primary motive of the 
process — i.e. whether the need of fertilization is 
a primary attribute of living matter, or whether it 
has been secondarily acquired in order to insure a 
mixture of germ-plasms derived from different 
sources." In his opinion the problem is not yet 
solved as to the function of fertilization, whether 
it is, as Weismann held, to multiply variation, or 
whether, as Hatschek maintained, it has the " con- 
verse function of checking variation, and holding the 
species true to the specific type." He says : " The 
present state of knowledge does not, I believe, allow 
of a decision between these diverse views." (Op. 
cit., p. 130.) But why may not both be true? It 



APPENDIX 215 

is not impossible to conceive that the same principle 
of fertilization may work in both directions, and 
for the securing of both vital results ; it may serve 
to neutralize slight, conflicting, and useless indi- 
vidual variations, and at the same time to accumu- 
late concurrent variations along lines of useful 
adaptation ; as opposite waves may lay each other 
level, and concurrent waves may become cumula- 
tive in their force. This double working of sexuality 
both for the maintenance and the variability of the 
species would thus furnish only another and beau- 
tiful illustration of the law of economy of energy 
in nature. 

In the Evolution of Sex Geddes and Thomson 
seek to find a deeper physiological necessity for the 
origin of sex (pp. 306 sq.). Their view, however, 
does not exclude the conception that as a secondary 
adaptation sex is a source of variation. 

NOTE V, p. 26 

Mr. Arthur M. Marshall thinks that Weismann's 
original explanation of the occurrence of death on 
account of its utility, although ingenious, was in- 
sufficient because it did "not attempt to explain 
the real nature of death, nor how it came about in 
the first instance." (Biological Lectures, p. 278.) 
He thinks, however, that in this respect, Maupas' 
researches furnish the very evidence, which Weis- 
mann lacked, of his theory that death occurs as a 
consequence of the separation of the germ-plasm 
from the somatic cells, and that " length of life is 
dependent upon the number of generations of 



216 APPENDIX 

somatic cells which can succeed one another in the 
course of a single life ; and furthermore that this 
number, as well as the duration of each single cell- 
generation, is predestined in the germ itself." 
While showing that natural death occurs among 
the Protozoa, and that the tendency to it may be in- 
herited by the Metazoa, Maupas' results, says Mr. 
Marshall, "confirm in the fullest manner Weis- 
raann's bold suggestions (i.) that the original oc- 
currence of death is intimately connected with 
sexual reproduction, if not indeed an actual conse- 
quence of it; (ii.) that the number of generations 
of somatic cells which can succeed one another in 
the course of a single life may be strictly limited. 
Maupas' experiments seem to me to afford the very 
evidence of which Weismann was in search." 
{Ibid., p. 285.) After applying these results to the 
Metazoa, Mr. Marshall draws these conclusions 
among others : " (i.) Death is not an intrinsic 
necessity, either of life or of organization, (ii.) 
Natural death first appeared, so far as we know at 
present, among the higher Protozoa, (iii.) Death 
is closely associated with the occurrence of conju- 
gation, and the consequent alternation of sexual 
and asexual modes of reproduction, (iv.) The 
asexual mode of reproduction, by fission, is the 
more primitive one. Conjugation, or sexual repro- 
duction, gives an advantage in the struggle for 
existence, and at first a luxury, has through the 
action of natural selection become a necessity." 
{Ibid., pp. 287-8.) 

Maupas, in his review of his results in the arti- 
cles already cited, holds that the senescence, which 



APPENDIX 217 

was shown after a succession of generations in his 
cultures, and the death in which it at last resulted, 
were the natural result of the prolonged exercise 
of the functions of the organism which used itself 
up. He is careful, however, to limit his assertion 
to the species actually experimented upon, and re- 
marks that the cause of natural death is an obscure 
subject in biology. His results do not prove that 
indefinite cell-division might not be continued in 
still lower organisms, not sufficiently developed to 
avail themselves of the improved method of reju- 
venescence by occasional or cyclic conjugations. 
His facts, so far as they go, indicate a natural limi- 
tation of cell-division, unless it be reinforced by 
conjugation, or rudimentary sexual reproduction. 
A recent writer in the Lancet seems to me there- 
fore to go beyond the known facts when he still 
asserts that "it has been shown that all proto- 
plasm, all living matter, is not of necessity mortal." 
We may admit, however, the statement of the same 
writer, that so far as yet proved, "Death as an 
incident in the evolutionary cycle is not inevitable 
to all living beings." It is also seen to be true, as 
this writer observes further of the multicellular 
organism, that "the price it pays for its greater 
elaboration of living is its inevitable death." The 
cause of death in these more specialized organisms 
this writer would find either (1) in imperfection of 
nutrition, or (2) in some toxic product of waste, 
or (3) in some lack of stimulus. {Lancet, Article 
on The Breaking Strain, May 23, 1896, p. 1413.) 
See also Geddes and Thomson, Evolution of Sex, 
pp. 258-262. 



218 APPENDIX 

Weismann, in a later essay, returned to the ques- 
tion concerning the cause of death. (Op. cit. 
vol. ii. pp. 72 sq.) He finds his original view con- 
firmed by Dr. Klein's recent observations with re- 
gard to the natural death of the body-cells of the 
Volvox, one of the earliest multicellular organisms. 
" As soon as the germ-cells are matured, and have 
left the body of the Alga, the flagellate somatic 
cells begin to shrink, and in one or two days are all 
dead " (p. 77). This, according to Weismann, is one 
of the instances of the first introduction of natural 
death. Here we see death in its beginnings. It 
occurs because the body-cells have acquired some 
special nutritive function for the benefit of the 
germ-cells ; and when the latter have matured, and 
that functional activity of the body-cells is no 
longer useful, the special protoplasmic modification 
which has fitted them to discharge such function, 
hastens the introduction of their death. 

There is room for much further investigation of 
the nature of vital continuity among the lower 
Infusoria. As Professor E. B. Wilson remarks, 
"The cyclical character of cell-division still remains 
sub judice." (The Cell in Development and Inheri- 
tance, p. 163.) In Sedgwick's and Wilson's General 
Biology, the present state of knowledge with refer- 
ence to the Amozba is thus stated : " However abun- 
dant the food-supply, Amozba never grows beyond a 
certain maximum limit. After this limit has been 
attained the animal sooner or later divides by ' fis- 
sion ' into two smaller Amozba,. Thus the existence 
of an individual Amozba is normally terminated, 
not by death, but by resolution into two new indi- 



APPENDIX 219 

viduals. This process is the simplest possible form 
of agamogenesis, and Amoeba is not known to mul- 
tiply in any other way." (p. 163.) "It is not 
known whether or not the Amoeba ever dies of old 
age." (p. 166.) 



NOTE VI, p. 28 

Whatever may be the ultimate causes of death, 
Weismann's conclusion as to the utility of death, 
or, as it may be called, its functional use in its con- 
nection with organic life, would not be set aside if 
some inherent necessity of death could be proved. 
At present such necessity is an assumption. So 
far as our knowledge goes, Weismann can still 
hold that any natural necessity of " death by se- 
nescence," as Maupas calls it, is an unproved assump- 
tion, not contained in any knowledge which we 
have of the molecular relations of living and multi- 
plying matter in its simplest terms. 

In our discussion above, however, we have not 
made the supposed immortality of even the sim- 
plest protoplasmic organization, or any inherent 
possibility of an endless succession of its genera- 
tions, the basis of the assertion of the original utility 
of death. These facts are sufficient to justify this 
conclusion: (1) The occurrence of death and of an 
improved sexual method of preserving and upbuild- 
ing life, appear in close connection, although the 
one may not be said to be the direct consequence 
of the other. (2) Both these occurrences are 
useful; they are joined together in a concurrent 
service for the advance of life. The one without 



220 APPENDIX 

the other could not do its perfect work for the 
maintenance and the benefit of life. If the one, 
whatever its primitive cause, may be regarded as 
an adaptation, which natural selection may seize 
upon for the advantage of the species, so also must 
the other be so regarded. (3) Death upon its first 
occurrence, like sex, must be regarded as a useful 
adaptation, because all the facts and considerations 
which Weismann adduces (irrespective of his theo- 
ries) indicate that it follows and illustrates a prin- 
ciple of utility. (4) To these considerations should 
be added as confirmatory of its initial usefulness 
such evidences of its utility as we may find farther 
down in the history of the development of life. 

Several indications, moreover, of a law of utility 
in the initial working of death may be derived 
from some of Maupas' own observations. Thus 
he noticed that the new method of conjugation 
between two cells does not increase, but diminishes 
the number of descendant cells ; it also exposes 
the conjugated cells to peril during a period of 
dormant activity ; but it secures the preservation 
of the species. This Maupas supposed to be its 
unique end. Here then nature is seen very early 
sacrificing the individual for the species. Death, 
in putting out of the way feebler unconjugated cells, 
works as an adaptive advantage for the success of 
the species. Maupas noticed also that the degen- 
erate forms in his cultures were enabled to con- 
tinue and multiply only by great care. In a free 
state individual cells, which might become degen- 
erate, would succumb soon after their appearance. 
(Arch, de Zool. 2d Series, vi. p. 211.) 



APPENDIX 221 

His investigations bring out further the interest- 
ing fact that one of the first and most important 
degradations of senescence consists in atrophy at 
first partial, then more complete, of the sexual 
organs. {Ibid., p. 261.) This observation in organ- 
isms where these functions of sex are rudimentary, 
shows again how closely death follows the intro- 
duction of a more advantageous method of repro- 
duction ; and it would seem to confirm Weismann's 
view of the immortality of the germ-plasm under 
favorable conditions . For by con j ugation the degen- 
eracy of the nucleus is avoided. There is, at least 
in these Infusoria, a process of its cyclical renewal. 
Maupas further observes that the individuals af- 
flicted with this first degree of degeneration can 
still continue to live and multiply ; but such life has 
something abnormal about it, until it becomes 
completely useless. " They and all their descend- 
ants, in short, are doomed to an inevitable death. 
They live still an individual life ; but they are dead 
to the life of the species." {Ibid., pp. 261-2.) Thus 
death strikes first at forms which have become 
useless to the species. When nature's method of 
keeping up the germ-plasm of the nucleus is 
interfered with, senescence and death result. All 
this illustrates Weismann's original conception of 
the utility of natural death. 

NOTE VII, p. 29 

In the article in Nature, already referred to, 
which was afterwards enlarged in Remarks on 
Certain Problems of the Day (printed in Essays 



222 APPENDIX 

upon Heredity, vol. ii.), Weismann elucidated still 
further his original thought as to the method 
by which natural selection operates in regard to 
death. His latest view may be briefly summarized 
as follows : the unicellular organisms are potentially 
immortal, because there is as yet no separation 
between the germ-plasm and the somatic elements 
in them, or not such a differentiation as would 
leave these two parts sufficiently separated to pur- 
sue independent courses. But such a differentiation 
erelong occurs. It appears distinctly marked in 
the Metazoa, and is characteristic of all multicellu- 
lar organisms. Thus a division of labor is intro- 
duced between the constituent elements of the 
organism. The germ-plasm bears the continuous, 
hereditary substance, which cannot naturally perish. 
But the somatic cells, which are subordinate to the 
germ-cells, may become mortal. By what changes 
in their molecular constitution they may acquire this 
possibility of mortality, Weismann does not profess 
to be able to state. But a limited number of their 
possible divisions and multiplications may be deter- 
mined in the nature of these cells. Better adapta- 
tion of them to the nutrition of the reproductive 
cells, or restriction of their function, might have 
accelerated the introduction of a natural death of 
the somatic cells. " The more specialized a cell 
becomes, or in other words, the more it is entrusted 
with only one distinct function, the more likely is 
this to be the case." Also, if we adopt the principle 
of panmixia (the tendency of organs no longer useful 
to become neutralized in the course of the contin- 
uous mixing of genital variations, and consequently 



APPENDIX 223 

to drop out, — the law of averages, as it might be 
named, by which all possible degrees of perfection 
are mixed, and the whole average reduced to a 
lower level than would have been secured by- 
natural selection of advantageous variations), it 
would be easy to conceive how the immortality 
of somatic cells, as soon as it became useless, 
would begin to disappear and eventually be lost. 
Natural selection was "trained to bear on the 
immortality of the germ-cells, but on quite other 
qualities in the somatic cells, — on motility, irri- 
tability, capacity for assimilation, etc." Death, 
having thus been introduced, it would become 
further advantageous to the species among higher 
organisms, that mutilated, accidentally crippled, 
and inferior forms should be dropped; so that 
natural selection would operate to determine the 
duration of life, — to lengthen it in instances 
where the reproductive processes require a longer 
period for their success, and to shorten it where a 
quicker reproduction would be advantageous to the 
species. Among the lowest Metazoa it is advanta- 
geous that the body should consist of a relatively 
small number of cells, and that the reproductive 
cells should ripen and escape all together. "If 
this conclusion be accepted, the uselessness of a 
prolonged life to the somatic cells is obvious, and 
the occurrence of death at the time of the extru- 
sion of the reproductive cells is explained. In this 
manner death (of the soma) and reproduction are 
here made to coincide." {Op. cit., vol. i. p. 156.) 

We are not obliged, however, to assume that 
natural selection is the chief factor, to the extent 



224 APPENDIX 

which Weismann supposes, in the introduction of 
death, in order to make good the assertion that death 
works along the lines of natural utility, and has 
become universally prevalent because on the whole 
it is serviceable to life. If for any cause, either 
from the limitations of possible molecular change 
in the matter of life, or from some unavoidable 
loss of energy in the replacement of cells, or from 
any supposed necessities of growth, a liability to 
death, and in time its actuality, is assumed; then 
natural selection, operating as a secondary factor, 
would seize upon it, emphasize, and disseminate. 
it ; and thus death would become prevalent as an 
adaptation of the species to its total conditions of 
existence ; death would reign because its law is on 
the whole of advantage to life. It is not improb- 
able that in the further development of our evolu- 
tionary philosophy natural selection may be given 
a more subordinate role than the part which is 
assigned to it by the Darwinian school. 

NOTE VIII, p. 117 

The extent to which some modern scientific 
thought has gone in dispensing with the conception 
of matter, is shown in an article by the German 
chemist, Prof. Wilhelm Ostwald, of Leipsic, en- 
titled, The Failure of Scientific Materialism, which 
was published in the Popular Science Monthly, vol. 
48, pp. 589-601. Reasoning from strictly scientific 
premises, without ulterior moral object, although 
not unaware of the further inferences which moral 
philosophy might draw from his conclusions, this 



APPENDIX 225 

chemist would abandon altogether the thought of 
matter, and substitute for it the conception of 
energy. He says, " The predicate of reality can 
be applied only to energy." " The supposition that 
all natural phenomena can be traced back pri- 
marily to mechanical factors cannot even be desig- 
nated as an available working hypothesis." He 
regards the mechanical theory as having failed to 
explain the facts. He says, " The most hopeful 
scientific gift which the departing century can 
offer the dawning one is the replacement of the 
mechanical theory by the energistic." 

NOTE IX, p. 150 

In the Contemporary Review for December, 1879, 
there is an interesting article in which it is shown 
that the principles of utility and beauty are far 
from being coextensive among the flowers. For 
instance, the writer, Edward Fry, refers to the 
cleistogamous flowers of the violet which are found 
to exist in the summer and autumn after all the 
more brilliant flowers have gone. He adds: "The 
one flower has everything in its favor — honey and 
a beauty of color and of smell that has passed into a 
proverb — and it opens its blue wings to the visits of 
the insect tribe in the season of their utmost jol- 
lity and life. The other has everything against it : it 
is inconspicuous, scentless, ugly, and closed. And 
yet, which succeeds the better? Which produces 
the more seed? The cleistogamous, and not the 
brilliant flowers ; the victory is with ugliness, and 
not with beauty." He gives other instances of the 



226 APPENDIX 

same character, "where ugliness has borne away 
the palm of utility from beauty." 

NOTE X, p. 170 

A hint of the working of life in other worlds 
than ours may possibly have come to us through 
the spectroscope if the statement made in Nature 
(1882, p. 400) be true, that absorption due to 
hydrocarbons has been observed to take place 
somewhere between the solar and terrestrial atmo- 
spheres ; but hydrocarbons are produced under the 
direction of life. This is important if true. (See 
Cope, Origin of the Fittest, p. 432.) 

NOTE XI, p. 177 

In the line of reasoning which we have followed, 
no account has been taken of accidental death. 
The consideration of this part of the subject would 
lead along a distinct line of inquiry, and we have 
deemed it better to keep the two apart. We will 
briefly indicate the separate line of inquiry which 
a thorough discussion of accidental death should 
follow. First, it would require a study of the re- 
lation among the lowest organisms between that 
which Weismann designates as natural or physio- 
logical death, and abnormal or accidental death. 
Our biology is hardly as yet in a position to give us 
the facts which we must have as a scientific foun- 
dation for this reasoning. Secondly, when suf- 
ficient data of biological facts are given, we must 
determine the relation between normal and abnor- 
mal death, and find what, if any, law of adaptation 



APPENDIX 227 

or use obtains in the relation between the two. In 
other words, the inquiry is to be made whether the 
abnormal deaths also do not fall under some com- 
prehensive law of utility. Thirdly, the inquiry 
would remain whether or not there is any observ- 
able tendency in evolution to reduce the abnormal 
destruction of life to the lowest terms consistent 
with the preservation of species. Fourthly, these 
observed facts and tendencies would then need to 
be taken up into our general philosophy, and 
viewed in their relations to other and higher ends 
of spiritual well-being. We might thus win a 
firmer position for our faith that the providential 
order of the world includes the abnormal as well as 
the normal, the tragic accident as well as the nat- 
ural and happy issue of life. The author hopes to 
take up this line of inquiry at some future time. 



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